How to make activity UI changes from an Android AsyncTask?

Question

In a scenario where I have a UI that will be updated from a separate thread (using AsyncTask), I can define the AsyncTask as an inner class of the activity, but this has two

Answer 1

I have a somewhat odd P.O.V with AsyncTasks because I generally prefer using normal Threads, but essentially the way I perform a background task and update a UI is create a Handler at the end of the onCreate() method, I'll then override the handleMessage(Message msg) method.

Then in my Thread, I'll pass the Handler in as a parameter, then when I wish to make an update I'll send a message from the thread to the Handler, now what this does is communicate from the new background thread onto the UI thread to process work on the UI.

Now I imagine AsyncTasks perform a similar task but removes the need to implement override the Handlers' handleMessage method.

It'd be interesting learning more about any advantages / disadvantages between these two approaches.