After the switch to Internet Identity v2, I ended up with two identities sharing the same display name — and I know I’m not alone.
On my Mac, some apps are linked to Johan, and others to… Johan.
You can imagine the confusion.
Without a way to rename identities, cleaning this up is rather tricky — one wrong move and you risk losing access to the apps tied to each identity. So for now I feel like frozen in an awkward situation…
Is a rename feature something the team is considering on the roadmap?
… or am I missing something?
Should I simply rename the passkeys in the Passwords app?
Keep up the great work — sending love to the team.
Johan
Go to id.ai → User another identity → Continue with passkey → Upgrade
Enter an identity number from step 1
Upgrade again → Enter your new identity name → Continue
Now either rename the passkeys in your password manager or create new passkeys from the access method management page and remove the old passkeys from your identity and password manager.
Before making any changes, make sure to activate and verify a recovery phrase for your identities so you don’t risk losing access when you make a mistake.
As for having this actually as a feature within II, one of the main challenges here is that renaming and identity within II doesn’t rename the passkey in the password manager. So to offer a reliable rename feature to users, we’d need to guide users to either rename or re-create (and cleanup old) passkeys. A web standard to rename passkeys would be very much appreciated, but doesn’t exist at this time of writing.
This is something that we’d very much like to implement, but given the amount of work involved with guiding users through various password managers and the other higher priority work like adding more language support, it likely won’t be prioritized soon.
Hopefully, the above workaround will offer a solution for the time being.
Thanks for the detailed workaround — much appreciated.
Quick question: step 2 & 4 says “Upgrade”. Since I already migrated to v2, why would I need to upgrade again?
Also, a couple of UX suggestions for id.ai/manage:
Show the identity number directly on the manage page. Having to go through the self-service tool to look it up adds friction, especially when you have multiple identities to sort out.
Confirm recovery phrase validity before prompting a reset. Right now, when you click “Unlock and reset,” enter your recovery phrase and hit Submit, you go straight to “Reset your recovery phrase?” — Above that message, it could say " Your current recovery phrase is correct", or an equivalent. I suppose this is implied, but those focus moments can never lack extra confirmations.
A visual diagram of the different components (identity, passkeys,…) could be helpful to understand how it works at a glance… In the Support blog, or even on the id.ai/manage home page.
You wouldn’t need to upgrade, it’s just that currently within this upgrade flow there’s UX to enter and set/update an identity name. So the above workaround solely makes use of this flow just to use the identity name set/update functionality within.
The identity number ideally shouldn’t be needed for users at all in any of the flows, e.g. the recovery phrase no longer requires the entry of the identity number either. It’s only needed for either existing users that need to upgrade or for debugging purposes.
Unfortunately renaming identities is one of the missing functionalities in II where the workaround now involves identity numbers, by mis-using the upgrade flow for a different purpose than it’s intended.
Overall this mostly affects existing users that have multiple identities, ideally we’d like existing users to be able to merge these into a single identity but unfortunately that’s not something that is going to be available any time soon.
I agree the UX flow of unlocking and resetting a locked recovery phrase isn’t ideal. This is mostly the case due to the unlock step being retrofitted within the existing reset UX flow while trying to keep custom code related to locked recovery phrases to a minimum.
Locked recovery phrases are no longer available in id.ai, we hope to bring a better and more secure alternative in the future.
Your current recovery phrase is correct", or an equivalent. I suppose this is implied, but those focus moments can never lack extra confirmations.