Summary

This chapter focused on doing background operations with Coroutines and Flow. Background operations are used for long-running tasks such as accessing data from the local database or a remote server.

You started with the basics of using Kotlin coroutines, Google’s recommended solution for asynchronous programming. You learned that you can make a background task into a suspending function with the suspend keyword. Coroutines can be started with the async or launch keywords.

You learned how to create suspending functions and how to start coroutines. You also used dispatchers to change the thread where a coroutine runs. Then, you used coroutines for performing network calls and modified the data retrieved with the map and switchMap LiveData transformation functions.

You then moved on to using Kotlin Flow in an Android app to load the data in the background. To safely collect flows in the UI layer, prevent memory leaks, and avoid wasting resources, you can use Lifecycle...