Is it recommended to execute time-consuming tasks in your Activity/Fragment?

Executing time-consuming tasks in your Activity or Fragment is not recommended because it can lead to poor user experience and application performance. When such tasks are run on the main UI thread, they may cause the application to become unresponsive, leading to a situation where the app appears frozen or results in an Application Not Responding (ANR) dialog. This directly affects user experience, as users expect the UI to be responsive and instant.

To maintain smooth user interactions, tasks that may take a significant amount of time—like network calls, database operations, or processing large amounts of data—should be performed on background threads. This approach allows the UI to remain responsive. Using tools provided by Android, such as Coroutines, WorkManager, or AsyncTask (though now deprecated), can help to carry out these tasks effectively without blocking the main thread.

In addition, conducting these tasks only during initialization is also not a comprehensive solution, as it might still impact the responsiveness of the app during that initialization phase if not done on a background thread. Overall, avoiding time-consuming operations on the main thread helps in delivering a better user experience and improved app reliability.