Understanding Kotlin coroutines and Flows
In this section, we will look at how threading works in the Android ecosystem and what applications must do to ensure that long-running operations do not block the user from using an application. We will then look at what available options we have available to execute operations in the background, with a focus on coroutines. Finally, we will look over Kotlin flows, which we can use to handle asynchronous work using a reactive and functional approach.
Android applications normally run in a single process on a user's device. When the operating system starts the application's process, it will allocate memory resources for the process to be executed. This process, when started, will have one thread of execution running within. This thread is referred to as the "main thread" or "user interface (UI) thread". In Android, this concept is very important because it is the thread that deals with user interaction. This...
