Asynctask vs Thread vs Services vs Loader

Question

I got slightly confused about the differences between Asynctask, Thread, Service, Loader in Android.

I know how

Answer 1

It doesn't really matter, what abstraction you use, it boils down to a Thread. So each of Android's async/parallel classes are using Thread/Executor behind the scenes, and have exactly the same potential problems, like locking, that the threads have.

The difference between then lies in its' usage. AsyncTask for example, defines a handy completion-callback - onPostExecute(). A CountDownTimer allows you to control the time and so on.

You can use a plain Thread of course, but in this case you have to invest more time in catching possible problems yourself.

So, Android provides you with a couple of right tools for right jobs.