What is the primary use of Shared Preferences in Android?

Shared Preferences in Android is primarily designed for storing small amounts of primitive data in key-value pairs. This mechanism is particularly useful for saving user preferences, application settings, or simple flags, such as whether a user has opted into notifications or what theme to use. The data stored in Shared Preferences is persisted across app sessions, allowing for a seamless user experience.

Each preference is accessed by a unique key, making it straightforward to retrieve and manipulate values. The API provides various methods for storing integers, floats, booleans, strings, and string sets, which aligns perfectly with the needs for handling user settings and lightweight data management within an application.

The other options relate to different data management strategies: large amounts of data are typically stored in a database or files, sharing data between applications often involves content providers, and maintaining a database for permanent storage would use SQLite or similar solutions. These serve different purposes than Shared Preferences, which is specifically tailored for small-scale, user-specific settings.