The idea is that your passwords are stored on the phone. You want a separate long random password for each account, so it’s unfeasible to remember them. It’s also a big pain to type every one such password on a screen keyboard. Thus, the password and the phone are the same factor.

I have avoided having important passwords on my phone because of this, but some people use their phones more heavily than I do. My more important accounts are only accessed via my laptop, using a TOTP phone app as 2nd factor. I rarely take the laptop out of the house.

JustEnoughDucks
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But this is only the case if you store your passwords in a plaintext file on your phone. Something that I hope nobody would be dumb enough to do, but I guess many people would.

If you have an encrypted password manager like Bitwarden or so where you have a single long password to open and get at your other long secure passwords, then it is essentially a different factor than your phone, right? Since having the phone unlocked would do nothing to help the attacker get to your password vault.

Well I find it a big pain to type a long complex password on a phone. Ymmv though.

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