How to get JSON data in chunks to report on progress? [duplicate]
Unfortunatelly, as it seems from the documentation on DefaultHttpClient, the execute method returns a HTTP response, already parsed, and hence, already read from the network, so you cannot plug in the input stream. That stream is prepared for you to be read, but once it has been retreived, as you have noticed. You'd have to use another strategy. For example, trying yourself the connection using the sockets API.
You can first ask the web service for the total number of contacts it has (say 100,000), and then ask it for individual "pages" of contacts (say 100 contacts/page). As each page arrives, you update the progress bar. If a page request fails just retry that request and continue processing. This should be a much more reliable and efficient approach than trying to get all 100k contacts in one massive request.