Accessing Content Providers

If you want to make your data public, you can create (or call) a content provider. This is an object that can store and retrieve data accessible by all applications. This is the only way to share data across packages; there is no common storage area that all packages can share. Android ships with a number of content providers for common data types (audio, video, images, personal contact information, and so on). You can see some of Android's native content providers in the provider package.

How a content provider actually stores its data under the covers is up to the implementation of the content provider, but all content providers must implement a common convention to query for data, and a common convention to return results. However, a content provider can implement custom helper functions to make data storage/retrieval simpler for the specific data that it exposes.

This document covers two topics related to Content Providers:

* Using a Content Provider
* Creating a Content Provider

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