What's the android AccountManager used for?
<p>I need some help understanding what the account manager offers us. I have a web service which requires a token for use. For example, if a developer wants to use my api, they would use a url like:</p>

<pre><code>http://myservice.com/addfriend?name=john&amp;token=abc
</code></pre>

<p>The token "abc" is retrieved by the developer using oauth. So now any developer that releases an app which uses my API will have to get their users to go through the oauth flow to get their own token for their app.</p>

<p>Does the android account manager solve any of this? Can developers query the account manager to see if the user has already auth'd in the past, and reuse whatever token is in that central location? I don't see how this would work, take Facebook as an example. They've created their own single-sign-on module. And they probably want to give each third party app that uses them a different token for tracking. And each third party app requests a different set of permissions. I don't know that the android account manager supports any of that.</p>

<p>So I'm curious why facebook would create their own sso support instead of using AccountManager to handle this. Also not sure if I have use cases for AccountManager correct here, maybe it has a totally different use case.</p>

<p>Thank you</p>
