Book Image

Android Studio 3.5 Development Essentials - Java Edition

By : Neil Smyth
Book Image

Android Studio 3.5 Development Essentials - Java Edition

By: Neil Smyth

Overview of this book

Android applications have become an important part of our daily lives and lots of effort goes into developing an Android application. This book will help you to build you own Android applications using Java. Android Studio 3.5 Development Essentials – Java Edition first teaches you to install Android development and test environment on different operating systems. Next, you will create an Android app and a virtual device in Android Studio, and install an Android application on emulator. You will test apps on physical Android devices, then study Android Studio code editor and constraint layout, Android architecture, the anatomy of an Android app, and Android activity state changes. The book then covers advanced topics such as views and widgets implementation, multi-window support integration, and biometric authentication, and finally, you will learn to upload your app to Google Play console and handle the build process with Gradle. By the end of this book, you will have gained enough knowledge to develop powerful Android applications using Java.
Table of Contents (86 chapters)
86
Index

55.8 Summary

This chapter has provided an overview of threading within Android applications. When an application is first launched in a process, the runtime system creates a main thread in which all subsequently launched application components run by default. The primary role of the main thread is to handle the user interface, so any time consuming tasks performed in that thread will give the appearance that the application has locked up. It is essential, therefore, that tasks likely to take time to complete be started in a separate thread.

Because the Android user interface toolkit is not thread-safe, changes to the user interface should not be made in any thread other than the main thread. Background tasks may be performed in a separate thread by subclassing the AsyncTask class and implementing the class methods to perform the task and update the user interface.