Android activity LifeCycle, whitch method to run while loop when app is runnig?

Question

I have created an app that is searhcing for bigger and bigger primes and saves them in a textfile. Right know im letting the user to click a button to make the app search for bigger primes and save the to file.

Istead of clicking i want the app to run a while loop in the background and do the searching and saving by it self without any user interaction.

Is the onStart(); a good method to put the while loop in so it runs in the background while the app is running? Also should i use te Runnable interface to dynamically show the user wich prime is found and saved to the file?

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

You can use Service if your while loop will do a lot of work or consider using AsyncTask (a few seconds at the most.).

A Service is an application component representing either an application's desire to perform a longer-running operation while not interacting with the user or to supply functionality for other applications to use ( here )

AsyncTask enables proper and easy use of the UI thread. here

As mentioned @EpicPandaForce, if you're doing a CPU intensive(mp3 for eg.) consider using an IntentService because it is executed on another thread.