Android Studio 4.1 Development Essentials – Kotlin Edition

64. An Introduction to Kotlin Coroutines

The previous chapter introduced the concepts of threading on Android and explained how the user interface of an app runs on the main thread. To avoid degrading or interrupting user interface responsiveness, it is important that time consuming tasks not block the execution of the main thread. One option, as outlined in the previous chapter, is to run any such tasks on a background thread, thereby leaving the main thread to continue managing the user interface. This can be achieved either directly using thread handlers or by making use of the AsyncTask class.

Although AsyncTask and thread handlers provide a way to perform tasks on separate threads, it can be time consuming to implement, and confusing to ...