Okay so little bit of digging and I found these gems from Bill Philips article on RecycleView
RecyclerView can do more than ListView, but the RecyclerView class itself has fewer responsibilities than ListView. Out of the box, RecyclerView does not:
- Position items on the screen
- Animate views
- Handle any touch events apart from scrolling
All of this stuff was baked in to ListView, but RecyclerView uses collaborator classes to do these jobs instead.
The ViewHolders you create are beefier, too. They subclass
RecyclerView.ViewHolder
, which has a bunch of methodsRecyclerView
uses.ViewHolders
know which position they are currently bound to, as well as which item ids (if you have those). In the process,ViewHolder
has been knighted. It used to be ListView’s job to hold on to the whole item view, andViewHolder
only held on to little pieces of it.Now, ViewHolder holds on to all of it in the
ViewHolder.itemView
field, which is assigned in ViewHolder’s constructor for you.