RecyclerView vs. ListView

Question

From android developer (Creating Lists and Cards):

The RecyclerView widget is a more advanced and flexible version of ListView.

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Answer 1

I want just emphasize that RecyclerView is a part of the compatibility package. It means that instead of using the feature and code from OS, every application carries own RecyclerView implementation. Potentially, a feature similar to RecyclerView can be a part of a future OS and using it from there can be beneficial. For example Harmony OS will be out soon.The compatibility package license can be changed in the future and it can be an implication. Summery of disadvantages:

1. licensing
2. a bigger foot print especially as a part of many apps
3. losing in efficiency if some feature coming from OS can be there

But on a good note, an implementation of some functionality, as swiping items, is coming from RecyclerView.

All said above has to be taken in a consideration.

Answer 2

Advantages of RecyclerView over listview :

1. Contains ViewHolder by default.

2. Easy animations.

3. Supports horizontal , grid and staggered layouts

Advantages of listView over recyclerView :

1. Easy to add divider.

2. Can use inbuilt arrayAdapter for simple plain lists

3. Supports Header and footer .

4. Supports OnItemClickListner .

Answer 3

Simple answer: You should use RecyclerView in a situation where you want to show a lot of items, and the number of them is dynamic. ListView should only be used when the number of items is always the same and is limited to the screen size.

You find it harder because you are thinking just with the Android library in mind.

Today there exists a lot of options that help you build your own adapters, making it easy to build lists and grids of dynamic items that you can pick, reorder, use animation, dividers, add footers, headers, etc, etc.

Don't get scared and give a try to RecyclerView, you can starting to love it making a list of 100 items downloaded from the web (like facebook news) in a ListView and a RecyclerView, you will see the difference in the UX (user experience) when you try to scroll, probably the test app will stop before you can even do it.

I recommend you to check this two libraries for making easy adapters:

FastAdapter by mikepenz

FlexibleAdapter by davideas

Answer 4

ListView is the ancestor to RecyclerView. There were many things that ListView either didn't do, or didn't do well. If you were to gather the shortcomings of the ListView and solved the problem by abstracting the problems into different domains you'd end up with something like the recycler view. Here are the main problem points with ListViews:

• Didn't enforce View Reuse for same item types (look at one of the adapters that are used in a ListView, if you study the getView method you will see that nothing prevents a programmer from creating a new view for every row even if one is passed in via the convertView variable)

• Didn't prevent costly findViewById uses(Even if you were recycling views as noted above it was possible for devs to be calling findViewById to update the displayed contents of child views. The main purpose of the ViewHolder pattern in ListViews was to cache the findViewById calls. However this was only available if you knew about it as it wasn't part of the platform at all)

• Only supported Vertical Scrolling with Row displayed Views (Recycler view doesn't care about where views are placed and how they are moved, it's abstracted into a LayoutManager. A Recycler can therefore support the traditional ListView as shown above, as well as things like the GridView, but it isn't limited to that, it can do more, but you have to do the programming foot work to make it happen).

• Animations to added/removed was not a use case that was considered. It was completely up to you to figure out how go about this (compare the RecyclerView. Adapter classes notify* method offerings v. ListViews to get an idea).

In short RecyclerView is a more flexible take on the ListView, albeit more coding may need to be done on your part.

Answer 5

Following are few key points/differences between RecyclerView & ListView. Take your call wisely.

If ListView works for you, there is no reason to migrate. If you are writing a new UI, you might be better off with RecyclerView.

RecylerView has inbuilt ViewHolder, doesn't need to implement our own like in listView. It support notify at particular index as well

Things like animating the addition or removal of items are already implemented in the RecyclerView without you having to do anything

We can associate a layout manager with a RecyclerView, this can be used for getting random views in recycleview while this was limitation in ListView In a ListView, the only type of view available is the vertical ListView. There is no official way to even implement a horizontal ListView. Now using a RecyclerView, we can have a

i) LinearLayoutManager - which supports both vertical and horizontal lists, ii) StaggeredLayoutManager - which supports Pinterest like staggered lists, iii) GridLayoutManager - which supports displaying grids as seen in Gallery apps.

And the best thing is that we can do all these dynamically as we want.

Answer 6

In addition to above differences following are few more:

1. RV separates view creation and binding of data to view. In LV, you need to check if convertView is null or not for creating view, before binding data to it. So, in case of RV, view will be created only when it is needed but in case of LV, one can miss the check for convertview and will create view everytime.

2. Switching between Grid and List is more easy now with LayoutManager.

3. No need to notify and update all items, even if only single item is changed.

4. One had to implement view caching in case of LV. It is provided in RV by default. (There is difference between view caching n recycling.)

5. Very easy item animations in case of RV.