In Virgil Dobjanschi talk during Google I/O he mentioned using Services for doing the fetching and then using a callback to notify the Activity whe
Option #1: Service sends a broadcast Intent, which the Activity catches via a BroadcastReceiver registered via registerReceiver().
Option #2: If the Activity is binding to the Service, have the Activity pass a listener to the Service, which the Service invokes when the work is complete.
Option #3: Service doesn't do much, but the ContentProvider calls notifyChange() when the data changes, which can ripple back through to the Activity and/or its Cursor on the data.
Option #4: Singletons, which should be avoided.
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Option #237: Service sends a letter via FedEx to the Activity. :-)
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All that being said, once they release the Twitter app as open source, you'll know for certain what the Twitter app does.