The simple answer is it's complicated.
Just for the record, I wrote most of the download provider, so I'm a
fair bit familiar with it (to say the least).
-The download provider is not proprietary code. It is also considered
a non-optional part of the platform. It is indeed meant to provide
I have got the Android source from source.android.com. In the source,
there is a java package, com.android.providers.downloads, which
provides by the looks of it a common method of downloading files
without re-inventing the wheel.
This package does not seem to be available on the Android 1.0
