I have a recyclerview which works as expected. I have a button in the layout that fills the list. The button is supposed to make a async call, and on result, I change the button
When the async code is done, you should update the data, not the views. After updating the data, tell the adapter that the data changed. The RecyclerView gets note of this and re-renders your view.
When working with recycling views (ListView or RecyclerView), you cannot know what item a view is representing. In your case, that view gets recycled before the async work is done and is assigned to a different item of your data.
So never modify the view. Always modify the data and notify the adapter. bindView should be the place where you treat these cases.