Sometimes, you may want to update the text shown in the progress dialog. If you try to perform this in doInBackground() you'll get an exception along the lines: Only the original thread that created a view hierarchy can touch its views The solution is to not do it

Sometimes you determine the max of the progress bar in the background task. Unfortunately, there's almost no way to transmit that to an UI thread-executed method like onProgressUpdate() (well, you could, but that'd be abusing the method). Instead you can do something like: public class MyTask