In short about Handler object in Android Android 15.07.2019

A Handler is an object maintaining a message queue for the asynchronous processing of messages or Runnable objects. You can use a Handler for asynchronous processes as follows:

var handlerThread : HandlerThread? = null
// or: lateinit var handlerThread : HandlerThread
...
fun doSomething() {
    handlerThread = handlerThread ?:
        HandlerThread("MyHandlerThread").apply {
            start() }

    val handler = Handler(handlerThread?.looper)
    handler.post {
        // do s.th. in background
    } 
}

If you create one HandlerThread as in this code snippet, everything that is posted gets run in the background, but it is executed sequentially there. This means handler.post{} will run the posts in series. You can, however, create more HandlerThread objects to handle the posts in parallel. For true parallelism, you’d have to use one HandlerThread for each execution.

Note Handler was introduced in Android a long time before the new java.util.concurrent package was available in Java 7. Nowadays for your own code, you might decide to favor the generic Java classes over Handler without missing anything. Handler, however, quite often show up in Android’s libraries.