Did someone from Google provide some "official solution"?
Yes.
The solution is more of an application architecture proposal rather that just some code.
They proposed 3 design patterns that allows an application to work in-sync with a server, regardless of the application state (it will work even if the user finishes the app, the user changes screen, the app gets terminated, every other possible state where a background data operation could be interrumpted, this covers it)
The proposal is explained in the Android REST client applications speech during Google I/O 2010 by Virgil Dobjanschi. It is 1 hour long, but it is extremely worth watching.
The basis of it is abstracting network operations to a Service
that works independently to any Activity
in the application. If you're working with databases, the use of ContentResolver
and Cursor
would give you an out-of-the-box Observer pattern that is convenient to update UI without any aditional logic, once you updated your local database with the fetched remote data. Any other after-operation code would be run via a callback passed to the Service
(I use a ResultReceiver
subclass for this).
Anyway, my explanation is actually pretty vague, you should definititely watch the speech.