Category: Mobile Development

In our previous posts we discussed SQLite access and Content Providers. Now access to a content provider will involve accessing some sort of persistent storage like a database or a file under the hood. Accessing a storage can be a long task and hence this should not be executed on the UI thread which will delay the rendering and could even lead to ANRs. Hence, background threads should be responsible for handling provider’s execution.

Continue reading “Using AsyncQueryHandler to Access Content Providers Asynchronously in Android”

If you really want to offer structured data or files to other applications, then you’ll have to write your own custom content provider. The entire process of creating your own content provider has various steps involved:

Continue reading “Android Creating a Custom Content Provider”

In the previous article (must read) we discussed how basic CRUD operations can be done on SQLite in Android. An SQLite database is inherently private to the application that creates it. That means if you want some other app to access your data that won’t be possible. To solve this limitation (its more of a security measure actually), Android has the concept of Content Providers using which one app can give out constrained access to its structured set of data to other apps. So a content provider allows application to access its data which is mostly stored in an SQLite database. It is important to note that just because providers allow you to share data with other applications doesn’t mean that it cannot be used in the same application to access data.

Continue reading “Android Sharing Application Data with Content Provider and Content Resolver”

In Android, a Service is an application component that can perform long-running operations in the background on the UI thread. By background, it means that it doesn’t have a user interface. A Service runs on the main thread of the calling Component’s process by default (and hence can degrade responsiveness and cause ANRs), hence you should create a new Thread to perform long running operations. A Service can also be made to run in a completely different process.

Continue reading “Understanding Android Started and Bound Services”

Interprocess Communication is the communication of threads across process boundaries. This type of communication is supported through the binder framework in Android. In the article on Services earlier, we discussed Bound Services that has a client-server interface. A bound service is the server which allows clients (components such as activities) to bind to the Service and then send requests and receive responses. The code we discussed works across threads in the same process but will fail in the case of remote services where the Service is running in a different process altogether.

Continue reading “Android Interprocess Communication (IPC) with Messenger (Remote Bound Services)”