Agreed, this is real dumb due to how heavy phone usage tends to be, it's something that breaks frequently. It drives me mad when some services like TransferWise use a proprietary in-app OTP instead of TOTP that I can back up easily to password-store and hardware key.

This. I recently got a new iPhone, most auth tokens didn’t xfer across (presumably they’re in the Secure Enclave). I’m root in some services including azure and aws tenancies. I have no idea what would happen if I lose my phone, as opposed to replacing it with the old phone next to me for a month for this exact use case

I had this worry too, I now use Bitwarden for my phone authenticator app needs. Everything's safe, backed up and I need my Yubikey to unlock it.

I can use it from my computer too, which is a side benefit.

The solutions I've heard of usually involve a screenshot of the seed QR code stored in a safe somewhere. Not optimal, but at least gives you a backup in case of disaster.

You can "read" the qr code, extract the TOTP seed and put it into app like bitwarden, where it would be both backed up and can generate the login codes too.

The problem are sites or services, that do use their own variations instead of standard.

This doesn’t work for push based auth, unsure if they support Totp fallback though