Improved password management and Autofill APIs [Diving into Android O]

When a developer comes up with a unique idea or app, Google has a habit of working on a version of their own to integrate directly into the Android operating system. While this is probably quite frustrating for the developer, it is widely appreciated by users, as many are not aware of individual apps, and it’s nice to have key features supported natively. This time, Google is going with management of management however, and is bringing platform support for autofill of secure user data such as addresses, usernames, and passwords.

Android O allows users to select an autofill manager just as they would a keyboard, so they can store different types of sensitive data in whatever manager they see fit. If they want to use one manager for their bank passwords and another for their email, they can do that.

Developers can also implement Autofill APIs directly into their apps, which should make sure that the correct text boxes are being populated with the data the user wants. Implementation of this was quite clunky before, and it is nice to see these features directly implemented into APIs.

We can likely expect major password managers to begin implementing the API’s in the near future, but since Android O won’t reach consumers until Q3 of this year, we’ll have to wait and see how it affects our daily app usage.

Do you use multiple password managers? Are you excited to see this improvement come to Android? Let us know in the comments!