That's the workflow they have for non-technical people aimed at minimizing the amount of people recovering accounts via customer support.
I'm fairly sure you can enable non-SMS 2FA without that even without Advanced Protection. I don't think I ever had SMS recovery/2FA enabled.
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The issue is that they have at least 3 workflows: the one for non-technical users, a more hidden way for people to set things up in a more specific way and then Advanced Protection Program for journalists, activists, etc. or other people with accounts that are high risk.
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Yeah, I get the complaint. I have similar complaints about nearly every site with 2FA. landing.google.com/advancedprotec avoids all the issues for Google though. You need to have at least 2 security keys and may want to have another one as an off-site backup but other than that is trivial.
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For Advanced Protection, the initial 2 security keys need to be physical standalone keys.
Once you've set it up, you can add phones with hardware keystores as additional security keys.
It's based around not wanting people to get very easily locked out of their accounts.
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Yeah, it uses the phone's HSM as a proper security key including physical confirmation being required to authorize it being used.
It's a real mess without Advanced Protection because there are so many 2FA methods including using phones as software 2FA rather than hardware 2FA.
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On Android, it uses developer.android.com/training/artic when available which is the Titan M for Pixels of the Qualcomm SPU for devices like modern flagship Samsung phones.
For older, non-Pixel phones, they use the traditional TEE-based hardware keystore.
Both have physical confirmation.
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