Content provider

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

Source: Content provider