Content Providers

Content providers can help an application manage access to data stored by itself, stored by other apps, and provide a way to share data with other apps. They encapsulate the data, and provide mechanisms for defining data security. Content providers are the standard interface that connects data in one process with code running in another process. Implementing a content provider has many advantages. Most importantly you can configure a content provider to allow other applications to securely access and modify your app data as illustrated in figure.

Figure 1. Overview diagram of how content providers manage access to storage.

Use content providers if you plan to share data. If you don’t plan to share data, you may still use them because they provide a nice abstraction, but you don’t have to. This abstraction allows you to make modifications to your application data storage implementation without affecting other existing applications that rely on access to your data. In this scenario only your content provider is affected and not the applications that access it. For example, you might swap out a SQLite database for alternative storage as illustrated in figure 2.

Figure 2. Illustration of migrating content provider storage.