What is a Content Provider?

Question

Android

A recent article describes the architecture of an application that has a Content Provider definition:

The content provider is very powerful with data change notifications and it's all out of the box. We use it mainly as a wrapper over the base. I did not find a way how to correctly shove the download of data from the Internet.

The documentation is completely different:

Content providers are one of the primary building blocks of Android applications, providing content to applications. They encapsulate data and provide it to applications through the single ContentResolver interface. A content provider is only required if you need to share data between multiple applications.

Those. Apparently the author of the article meant another Content provider, or not?

Answer 1

Correct in the documentation: a component that distributes data for several applications (although it can only be one, but the very idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe component is to provide access to data for several applications). It's about the same thing. Android has only one Content Provider.

Answer 2

No, it's just that the author of the article does not have the gift of a clear explanation :)

Answer 3

Content Provider - an entity that is an independent wrapper over data sources (the business logic of the application may not even know exactly how it is arranged: a database, files, a server, or something else), which also follows a REST-like architecture and seeks to bring data into a generalized type.
Briefly, you can find here habrahabr.ru/post/132720
PS this entity has many interesting features: for example, the documentation does not say that they were used to implement the classic A, B, C patterns by Virgil Dobjanschi (Google IO 2010 conference www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHXn3Kg2IQE ).
The topic is actually very extensive, it can't be covered in one paragraph, you need to study/practice. Content providers have not lost their relevance today, quite the contrary.