Single thread pool - ExecutorService or Handler + HandlerThread

Question

Traditionally, when I need a single thread pool, I will use

ExecutorService executorService = Executors.newSingleThreadExecutor();
executorService.submit(...

However, when look at Weather List Widget, I realize that we can use Handler + HandlerThread to achieve the similar objective

HandlerThread sWorkerThread = new HandlerThread("WeatherWidgetProvider-worker");
sWorkerThread.start();
Handler sWorkerQueue = new Handler(sWorkerThread.getLooper());
sWorkerQueue.post(...

I was wondering, what is the consideration I should take, in order have a right choice among them?

Answer 1

HandlerThread is simpler than than ExecutorService. So it will use less resources and work faster. So if you have a lot of small messages process them via Handler.

But Executors it's not just a class. Executors is a standart. It's a framework with a lot of features and every java programmer can understand your code written with executors. A lot of libraries can work with executors. It's flexible, you can easily change executor type or executor queue. So if you have a complex processing task and you do not know how exactly implement it use executors.