Overview

A content provider presents data to external applications as one or more tables that are similar to the tables found in a relational database. A row represents an instance of some type of data the provider collects, and each column in the row represents an individual piece of data collected for an instance.

A content provider coordinates access to the data storage layer in your application for a number of different APIs and components as illustrated in figure 1, these include:

• Sharing access to your application data with other applications
• Sending data to a widget
• Returning custom search suggestions for your application through the search framework using SearchRecentSuggestionsProvider
• Synchronizing application data with your server using an implementation of AbstractThreadedSyncAdapter
• Loading data in your UI using a CursorLoader