02.Authority String, Content URI, and URI Patterns

A ContentProvider is the building block of Android similar to the Activity, Service, or BroadcastReceiver. It allows apps to securely share private data to other apps and manages the access to the central repository of data.

Android Framework provides developers with four components: Activity, Service, BroadcastReceiver, and ContentProvider. This course, Android Fundamentals: Content Providers, talks about how ContentProvider helps an application manage access to data stored by itself and provides a way to share data securely with other apps. Content providers are the standard interface that connect data in one process with code running in another process. This course starts with overview of ContentProvider and letting you design a structured data storage such as SQlite database from scratch. With the help of ContentProvider you'll then perform CRUD operations on SQlite database. Further, you'll explore how to share app's private data securely with some other apps using ContentProvider. At the end of the course, you'll use the concept of Android Permissions to enhance application security.