Manual Item Decoration - ListView has the android:divider property for easy dividers between items in the list.

In contrast, the RecyclerView.Adapter requires a custom implementation to supply the data to the adapter.

Manual Data Source - ListView had adapters for different sources such as ArrayAdapter and CursorAdapter for arrays and database results respectively.

In contrast, the RecyclerView has the RecyclerView.ItemAnimator class for handling item animations.

Easy Item Animations - ListView contains no special provisions through which one can animate the addition or deletion of items.

In contrast, the RecyclerView has a RecyclerView.LayoutManager that allows any item layouts including horizontal lists or staggered grids.

Customizable Item Layouts - ListView can only layout items in a vertical linear arrangement and this cannot be customized.

In contrast, implementing an adapter for RecyclerView requires the use of the ViewHolder pattern for which it uses RecyclerView.Viewholder.

Required ViewHolder in Adapters - ListView adapters do not require the use of the ViewHolder pattern to improve performance.

RecyclerView differs from its predecessor ListView primarily because of the following features: RecyclerView also begins to enforce the ViewHolder pattern too, which was already a recommended practice but now deeply integrated with this new framework.įor more details, see this detailed overview.

ItemAnimator - Helps with animating the items for common operations such as Addition or Removal of itemįurthermore, it provides animation support for RecyclerView items whenever they are added or removed, which had been extremely difficult to do with ListView.LayoutManager - Helps in positioning the items.RecyclerView.Adapter - To handle the data collection and bind it to the view.If you want to use a RecyclerView, you will need to work with the following: Use the RecyclerView widget when you have data collections whose elements change at runtime based on user action or network events. One of the reasons is that RecyclerView has a more extensible framework, especially since it provides the ability to implement both horizontal and vertical layouts. It is supposed to be the successor of ListView and GridView. The RecyclerView is a ViewGroup that renders any adapter-based view in a similar way.

Android studio recyclerview cardview