Android :: How To Design "manual Animation" Into Droid Game Without Code Delays?

I am writing a game for Android and I think I have a fatal flaw in my architecture and/or code. The architecture is basically two threads, one that just continuously draws the screen and the other than controls the movement of the drawables on the screen based on the user's touch screen input. In the latter thread, I'm basically doing manual animation (insert correct term here), meaning I move the drawables on the screen via methods that change the Drawables Rect as the game progresses. The "no-no" I believe I'm doing is inserting delays into these methods, so that it "appears like an actual animation." This all works fine and dandy because I have no reason to process any user input during these animations, but it's really bugging me that I'm designing a flaw into a lot of hard work with my game. I'm sure many of you can relate to this in terms of code design.