Addressing the UX

Beyond the threading issues, there is another challenge with showing large result sets in a single UI (e.g., in a RecyclerView): it is a pain for users to navigate. Nobody is going to want to scroll through 10,000 rows in a vertically-scrolling list — their finger will develop a blister first.

If you anticipate having a large amount of data, your primary concern is to get the UX right. Focus on searching, filtering, and other means for the user to easily scope the required data to some subset of relevance. Do not have the primary UX be a “scroll through the world” sort of experience, even if that is an available option for users who are gluttons for punishment or have steel-tipped fingers (or, perhaps, a stylus).

However, even with user-supplied constraints, you still might wind up with more data than can fit in a CursorWindow. And we have no direct control over that CursorWindow behavior, as it is hidden behind a few layers of abstraction.