Password managers are a staple for surviving the modern Internet, but Google and Apple have been promoting a world in which users won’t need to memorize passwords or worry about hackers stealing all of your credentials. While the road to a passwordless future isn’t exactly finished, Google released a new tool that will make it easier for app developers to offer a simple sign-in experience in their apps, regardless of the type of credentials that are required for the account.

Credential Manager

The new Credential Manager API is designed to streamline access to credentials stored in a user’s Google account. Once integrated into an app’s login flow, an app can ask Google to show a list of credentials associated with an app or service, and users can simply tap to pick the one they want to use. It doesn’t matter whether the account requires a traditional username and password, Sign-in with Google, or the new passkey standard. Naturally, the Credential Manager also supports saving passwords for new and existing accounts, or setting up a passkey with services that support it.

While the initial (‘alpha’) release of Credential Manager only supports credentials stored in a user’s Google account, today’s announcement blog post confirms that the system will support third-party password managers in a future release. This is good news for users that already have or plan to continue storing their credentials separately from their Google accounts, but it will also be important for scenarios like employees that use a service for shared credentials.

It’s clear Google is also taking this opportunity to build awareness for the passkey standard and encourage developers to implement it as a more secure alternative to passwords. Check out Google’s explainer for passkeys to get more details, or watch the video below (starting at 9 minutes in) for a summary of how they work and Google’s approach to supporting them.

Google has been iterating on its efforts to simplify the sign-in experience for quite a while, beginning all the way back in 2015 with Smart Lock Passwords, and most recently evolved into One Tap and Block Store. The new Credential Manager API offers the same basic flow for users, but takes the mission a step further with the adoption of passkeys. While adoption for previous simple sign-in APIs has been underwhelming, the latest iteration smooths over some of the rough edges, and the experience of using this with third-party password managers will be a vast improvement over the Autofill API — once it has rolled out.

For developers looking to implement Credential Manager in their apps, it can be found in the credentials library as a part of Jetpack, Google’s collection of libraries that assist Android developers with integrating advanced features and OS capabilities. The implementation steps are fairly straightforward, and Google provides most of the code needed to get it up and running in an app.