Security tokens are more secure and can't be as easily fished as phone-based 2FA solutions. It's not about using the key on a mobile phone, it's about replacing

Security tokens are more secure and can't be as easily fished as phone-based 2FA solutions. It's not about using the key on a mobile phone, it's about replacing phone-based 2FA. You're right however that their key doesn't seem to have any interface other than USB so it won't be practically usable on smartphones. Yubico has NFC tokens[1] for that use case but it doesn't seem that Google's version offers that yet. [1] https://www.yubico.com/products/yubikey-for-mobile/ https://www.yubico.com/products/yubikey-for-mobile/