Every Android developer, at one point or another, needs to deal with threads in their application. When an application is launched in Android, it creates the first thread of execution, known as the “main” thread. The main thread is responsible for dispatching events to the appropriate user interface widgets as well as communicating with components from the Android UI toolkit.
To keep your application responsive, it is essential to avoid using the main thread to perform any operation that may end up keeping it blocked.
Network operations and database calls, as well as loading of certain components, are common examples of operations that one should avoid in the main thread. When they are called in the main thread, they are called synchronously, which means that the UI will remain completely unresponsive until the operation completes. For this reason, they are usually performed in separate threads, which thereby avoids blocking the UI while they are being performed (i.e., they are performed asynchronously from the UI).
In this article, Eliran Goshen examines the concept behind Android threading in detail with relevant source code and screenshots.
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