After some googling, I selected various sources and started to use a separate thread to download images to make the UI responsive. It actually worked like a charm. But after a few minutes it would freeze the emulator. Initially I had assumed various reasons but finally I figured out that if this threading code is removed it works without freezing the emulator.
The code was adapted from another Stackoverflow question from the answer given by a certain Fedor. For the sake of simplicity I had removed the HashMap part and directly download the image each time a request comes from the list adapter. Also, I assumed that since the image is very small (< 1 KiB) it can actually be downloaded again rather than storing it in memory.
I am not sure if this is the right way to handle asynchronous image download, but any help in preventing the emulator freeze would be much appreciated. I can copy paste the code if needed.
