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

57.10 Creating an AsyncTask for Service Tasks

As outlined in “A Basic Overview of Threads and AsyncTasks”, when an Android application is first started, the runtime system creates a single thread in which all application components will run by default. This thread is generally referred to as the main thread. The primary role of the main thread is to handle the user interface in terms of event handling and interaction with views in the user interface. Any additional components that are started within the application will, by default, also run on the main thread.

As demonstrated in the previous section, any component that undertakes a time consuming operation on the main thread will cause the application to become unresponsive until that task is complete. It is not surprising, therefore, that Android provides an API that allows applications to create and use additional threads. Any tasks performed in a separate thread from the main thread are essentially performed in...