What is the purpose of Looper and how to use it?

I am new to Android. I want to know what the Looper class does and also how to use it. I have read the Android Looper class documentation but I am unable to completely understand it.
I have seen it in a lot of places but unable to understand its purpose. Can anyone help me by defining the purpose of Looper and also by giving a simple example if possible?

You can better understand what Looper is in the context of the GUI framework. Looper is made to do 2 things.

1. Looper transforms a normal thread into something run continuously until Android app is running.

2. Looper provides a queue where jobs to be done are enqueued.

As you may know, when an application is launched, the system creates a thread of execution for the application, called “main”, and Android applications normally run entirely on a single thread by default the “main thread”. But main thread is not a secret, special thread. It’s just a normal thread similar to one you can create with new Thread(), which means it terminates when its run() method returns! Think of below example.

public class HelloRunnable implements Runnable {
    public void run() {
        System.out.println("Hello from a thread!");
    }

    public static void main(String args[]) {
        (new Thread(new HelloRunnable())).start();
    }
}

Now, let’s apply this simple principle to Android apps. What would happen if an Android app runs on a normal thread? A thread called “main” or “UI” or whatever starts your application and draws all UI. So the first screen is displayed to users. What now? The main thread terminates? No, it shouldn’t. It should wait until users do something, right? But how can we achieve this behavior? Well, we can try with Object.wait() or Thread.sleep(). For example, main thread finishes its initial job to display first screen, and sleeps. It awakes, which means interrupted, when a new job to do is fetched. So far so good, but at this moment we need a queue-like data structure to hold multiple jobs. Think about a case when a user touches screen serially, and a task takes longer time to finish. So, we need to have a data structure to hold jobs to be done in first-in-first-out manner. Also, you may imagine, implementing ever-running-and-process-job-when-arrived thread using interrupt is not easy, and leads to complex and often unmaintainable code. We’d rather create a new mechanism for such purpose, and that is what Looper is all about. The official document of Looper class says, “Threads by default do not have a message loop associated with them”, and Looper is a class “used to run a message loop for a thread”. Now you can understand what it means.

To make things more clear, let’s check the code where the main thread is transformed. It all happens in ActivityThread class. In its main() method, you can find below code, which turns a normal thread into something that we need.

public final class ActivityThread {
    ...
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        ...
        Looper.prepareMainLooper();
        Looper.loop();
        ...
    }
}

and Looper.loop() method loop infinitely and dequeue a message and process one at a time:

public static void loop() {
    ...
    for (;;) {
        Message msg = queue.next(); // might block
        if (msg == null) {
            // No message indicates that the message queue is quitting.
            return;
        }
        ...
        msg.target.dispatchMessage(msg);
        ...
    }
}

So, basically, Looper is a class that is made to address a problem that occurs in the GUI framework. But this kind of need can also happen in other situations as well. Actually, it is a pretty famous pattern for multi-thread applications, and you can learn more about it in “Concurrent Programming in Java” by Doug Lea(Especially, chapter 4.1.4 “Worker Threads” would be helpful). Also, you can imagine this kind of mechanism is not unique in Android framework, but all GUI framework may need somewhat similar. You can find almost same mechanism in Java Swing framework too.