Question

I need to download a web page on an Android app and I am having a hard time deciding whether to use the Android Apache HTTP client or Java’s URLConnection.

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

For most things I’d say that HttpClient is the way to go. However there are some situations and edge cases where I’d fall back to a URLConnection. Examples of edge cases here and here

EDIT
A similar question has been asked before: httpclient vs httpurlconnection. I would assume that HttpUrlConnection is somewhat faster as the HttpClient is built on top of the standard Java libraries. However I would find HttpClient code much quicker and easier to write and maintain. According to a comments below, the core elements of HttpClient have been performance optimised.

If performance is a major concern your best bet is to write two clients, one using each method, then benchmark them both. If you do this, please let us know the results.