Should you use AccountManager for storing Usernames and Passwords for an Android app?
I would like to know if one should implement AccountManager to save user credentials such as username, email, passwords etc. I can't find a good reason to use it myself.
I don't want other applications to have access to the Accounts and I don't really want them showing in the "Accounts and Sync" settings (although maybe that's not a big deal).
So my question is: should I use it? Pros/cons? Can I hide the Accounts from other apps and stop them from appearing in "Accounts and Sync"?
Answer
This accepted answer to this question would probably help you... What should I use Android AccountManager for?
It should also be pointed out, as mentioned in the above post and also in AccountManager without a SyncAdapter? , that you can't have an AccountManager without a SyncAdapter, so its probably not good to use this for your particular situation.
I can't see any reason to use an AccountManager specifically for storing this type of information - at the end of the day, its no different to manually storing the data yourself in your own database or file. If anything, it probably complicates things - why don't you just store it in SharedPreferences?
The only reason I could think of that would encourage the use of AccountManager would be if you want to share your account across a number of different apps, as the data is stored in the central Android datastore which can be accessed by all apps. However, if this isn't required, I think its probably easier and simpler to just use SharedPreferences