Its purpose is to allow the system-wide SyncManager to manage syncing data to/from a web service in the background. But if your goal is just to store user credentials somewhere, it's not necessarily the right place to do so, which is why I imagine some apps choose not to use it.

As an example the Github app that came out the other did things right and installs itself with AccountManager. That means any app can now authenticate against Github without needing its own code.

I will admit that it isn't trivial to add your own stuff to AccountManager, but the important part is that it only has to be coded by that provider once (Github in the above example) not by every single app that wants to use it.

The iPad browser is a trainwreck in this regard. Not only doesn't it support LastPass or 1Password. It also utterly fails to remember passwords that were painfully entered manually.

For most sites it simply doesn't recognize the login at all. On some sites it works intermittently, often forgetting the password for no reason or the auto-fill not working reliably.

And don't get me started on HTTP-Auth. You can save those sites (by making a bookmark) but you get a phishing warning every single time you access it.

I have pretty much abandoned the iPad for browsing for this reason. The only time I fire it up is to lookup a movie on rotten tomatoes.

I'm still bitter this device was pitched to me as "the internet in your hands". It's not up to the task. Not even close.

(I agree that the default behavior sucks)

If I had a child I'd want to be able to let them use my phone but only in a special mode that allowed access to a limited number of whitelisted websites & apps.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/07/all-or-nothing... http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/soups/2012/proceedings/a2_Hayashi.pdf

But: yes.

I'd like my phone to offer a few different "shells" of access:

- Emergency calls.

- "Share" or "play" mode. Selected photos or apps.

- "Mobile" -- ready access to stuff I need, but not distractions (the "Car Panel" on some Android phones is somewhat like this, but I'd appreciate if it didn't encourage use while driving).

- "Full" complete and potentially immersive access.

That said, it would be nice to have the option of telling the app to cache your credentials.

A short appstore PIN could solve this much more easily.

Now, an SD card with a certificate plus face recognition might be ok ;-)

But for biometrics, keep in mind that biometric systems are currently seen as the most subject to false positives of any authentication system out there with the possible exception of improperly maintained and insufficiently strong passwords.

The vast majority of Google account holders only have one account, you and the average HN user are atypical.

as google apps for business and schools becomes more and more popular, this becomes more and more wrong. Tons of non-technical people have a personal gmail account and a school/work one.

I love this article about an ecommerce site and requiring people to register: http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/

Note one statistic: Later, we did an analysis of the retailer's database, only to discover 45% of all customers had multiple registrations in the system, some as many as 10.

That puts the order of magnitude of people having more than one account around half. That of course doesn't mean that people have multiple Google accounts, just multiple accounts but Google is becoming increasingly pervasive being the email provider for companies, universities, organisations etc.