Why use spring.factories for Spring Boot auto-configuration instead of annotations?

Question

The documentation states:

Developing auto-configuration and using conditions

If you work in a company that develops shared libraries, or i

Answer 1

all the entries in spring.factories are loaded by below method -

org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.ImportAutoConfigurationImportSelector#loadFactoryNames

protected Collection loadFactoryNames(Class source) {
        return SpringFactoriesLoader.loadFactoryNames(source, getClass().getClassLoader());
    }

SpringFactoriesLoader belongs to the spring-core library see below screen shot