RecyclerView is the best approach to show scrolling lists on Android. It ensures high performance & smooth scrolling, while providing list elements with flexible layouts. Combined with modern language features of Kotlin, the code overhead of the RecyclerView is greatly reduced compared to the traditional Java approach.
Updated on December 15th, 2020: the solution projects on GitHub have been migrated to the latest versions and dependencies. Most importantly, the new solutions now also use Jetpack View Bindings instead of Kotlin synthetics. The text in this article is still the original.
Updated on July 4th, 2019: Google is transitioning the additional libraries to AndroidX. Nothing changes in terms of behavior with regards to our example. I’ve updated the source code examples on GitHub to use AndroidX instead of the Android Support libraries.
Sample Project: PartsList – Getting Started
In this article, we’ll walk through a sample scenario: a scrolling list for a maintenance app, listing machine parts: “PartsList”. However, this scenario only affects the strings we use – you can copy this approach for any use case you need.