How to fetch data over network

Making a network request in Android is very cumbersome unless you use any third-party library. For example, let's take a look at how network requests in Android used to be:

try {
    URL url = new URL("<api call>");

    urlConnection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
    urlConnection.setRequestMethod("GET");
    urlConnection.connect();

    InputStream inputStream = urlConnection.getInputStream();
    StringBuffer buffer = new StringBuffer();
    if (inputStream == null) {
        // Nothing to do.
        return null;
    }
    reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(inputStream));

    String line;
    while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
        buffer.append(line + "\n");
    }

    if (buffer.length() == 0) {
        return null;
    }
    result = buffer.toString();
} catch...