Android Studio Loaders have been deprecated as of Android P (API 28)?

Question

I am new in Android, I have finished some Android app development courses and now I am trying to apply what I learned. I've chosen a news app for it. It will extract news' from 5-10 source and display them in recyclerview.

I recognized that the course materials I used is outdated. I've used AsynctaskLoader to handle internet connection issues but now in official Android documentation it says "Loaders have been deprecated as of Android P (API 28). The recommended option for dealing with loading data while handling the Activity and Fragment lifecycles is to use a combination of ViewModels and LiveData."

My question is should I convert my code to comply with ViewModels and LiveData or would Asynctask handle my task (or any other suggestion)? As I mentioned I only want to extract news data from a couple of source and display them in the app. It seems I don't need data storage feature. But, for now I have added two news source and the app seems to load news data a little bit late. Does this latency has something to do with using loaders? Would using viewmodels speed up news loading task (especially when there are lots of news source)?

Answer 1

If you've already written it with Loaders there's no reason to rush to change it. Deprecated doesn't mean gone. And no, Loaders don't add significant performance penalty- any perf issues would be elsewhere in your app.