Is AsyncTask deprecated now w/ AsyncTaskLoader?

Question

Since AsyncTaskLoader does everything AsyncTask can do, and additionally has in-built best practice features such as thread-duplication & pre-mature death prevention.

Is there any reason to use AsyncTask anymore? Or should I just blindly use AsyncTaskLoader everywhere

Answer 1

• When you have a background job that need to be done no matter activity is destroyed or not: Service or IntentService of some mechanism of background job.
• When you have a background job that need to be done and notify back again to UI: using AsyncTaskLoader.
• When you have a background job that need to be done and notify back again to user and continue to run although activity is destroyed: using AsyncTask because AsyncTask continue to run when your activity is paused/destroyed/configuration changed ... In this case, be careful you will have memory leak/activity object is null. You must handle by yourself.

Every situation, there are different ways for handling and avoiding. But keep in mind above flow for easiest solution.

Answer 2

In 2017 when this question was asked, AsyncTask was still not deprecated. However, It is deprecated in Android 11 as AsyncTask requires a lot of checks to avoid memory leaks.

The commit in the Android ASOP project has the @deprecated notice:

@deprecated Use the standard java.util.concurrent or Kotlin concurrency utilities instead.