Changes

The next chapter will be the first in a series of chapters intended to introduce the use of Android Services to perform application tasks in the background. It is impossible, however, to understand the steps involved in implementing services without first gaining a basic understanding of the concept of threading in Android applications. Threads and the AsyncTask class are, therefore, the topic of this chapter.

Threads are the cornerstone of any multitasking operating system and can be thought of as mini-processes running within a main process, the purpose of which is to enable at least the appearance of parallel execution paths within applications.