MS Authenticator accounts not synced across IOS devices

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[dmt_3904]

I have Authenticator on my IPAD and Iphone. But the accounts are not the same.  I just added a new one to my phone, but the IPAD doesn’t pick it up.  And my IPAD has an account (my outlook email) that the iphone doesn’t. I searched online, but couldn’t find anything helpful.

Shouldn’t they sync? How do I get them in sync?  My Microsoft account and AZURE AD is on both, but I don’t recall doing anything to sync those. thanks, Donna

• This topic was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by dmt_3904.

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By design, if you just set up authenticator app on multiple devices the sign ups are not sync’d.

But there’s different ways to set up so that you get the same accounts on all devices:

https://blog.ciaops.com/2019/01/15/using-multiple-authenticator-apps-with-a-single-microsoft-365-user-account/

The trick to overcoming both of these limitations is to select the link Configure app without notifications to the right of the QR code as shown above.

image

When you do so, you’ll get a new QR, that looks very similar but has different wording a link.

You can now use this QR to set up multiple Microsoft Authenticator apps on different devices as well as third party authenticators. You may also want to take a screen shot of this QR code for future reference if you wish to set up or reconfigure authenticator devices in the future.

Some considerations here. All devices you now use with this QR code will configure the same identical sequence of rolling numbers for authentication. Thus, when you configure multiple devices this way you’ll see that the pin numbers will be identical on all devices and will change more or less at the same time. What you have effectively achieved here is a duplication of the MFA token for that user. Is that a good thing? Best practice is to only have ONE and only ONE authenticator per account but there are scenarios I will illustrate later where having a duplicate is acceptable. However, please remember, the more tokens you have for an account, the less secure it is.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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IT Manager Geek, dmt_3904

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