What this book covers

Chapter 1, Building Responsive Android Applications, gives an overview of the Android process and thread model, and describes some of the challenges and benefits of concurrency in general, before discussing issues specific to Android.

Chapter 2, Staying Responsive with AsyncTask, covers the poster child of concurrent programming in Android. We learn how AsyncTask works, how to use it correctly, and how to avoid the common pitfalls that catch out even experienced developers.

Chapter 3, Distributing Work with Handler and HandlerThread, details the fundamental and related topics of Handler, HandlerThread, and Looper, and illustrates how they can be used to schedule tasks on the main thread, and to coordinate and communicate work between cooperating background threads.

Chapter 4, Asynchronous I/O with Loader, introduces the Loader framework and tackles the important task of loading data asynchronously to keep the user interface responsive and glitch free.

Chapter 5, Queuing Work with IntentService, gives us the means to perform background operations beyond the scope of a single Activity lifecycle and to ensure that our work is completed even if the user leaves the application.

Chapter 6, Long-running Tasks with Service, extends the capabilities we discovered with IntentService and gives us control over the level of concurrency applied to our long-running background tasks.

Chapter 7, Scheduling Work with AlarmManager, completes our toolkit by enabling us to arrange for work to be done far into the future and on repeating schedules. It also enables us to build apps that alert users to new content and start instantly with fresh data.