Why use ContentProvider.getType() to get MIME type?

For example, you're writing content provider for picture gallery. You should mention in your getType() method that you provide pictures - jpg or png. So, when one will launch image gallery, it will be able to show built-in pictures and pictures provided by your content provider.

In pseudocode the user of contentProvider do something like:

List contentProviders = getProviders();List resultProviders;final Type type = Type.JPG;for (ContentProvider provider : contentProviders) {  if (type == provider.getType()) {     resultProviders.add(provider);  }}

This is pseudocode, but I hope you will got the idea.

As I understand it, a use case could be the following:

App A contains the content provider. App B uses that content provider to retrieve all the data items from App A. The user then picks one of these (in App B) and after that an activity in App A to show/edit/delete the selected data item should be started. So App B then creates an intent, and to make sure that an activity in App A handles it, you need to set the (mime-)type of the intent to the mime-type of the uri (the show/edit/delete activities in App A has added this mime type to their intent filters).