Android Recyclerview vs ListView with Viewholder

The other plus of using RecycleView is animation, it can be done in two lines of code

RecyclerView.ItemAnimator itemAnimator = new DefaultItemAnimator();        recyclerView.setItemAnimator(itemAnimator);

But the widget is still raw, e.g you can't create header and footer.

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 methods RecyclerView 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, and ViewHolder 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.

More from Bill Phillip's article (go read it!) but i thought it was important to point out the following.

In ListView, there was some ambiguity about how to handle click events: Should the individual views handle those events, or should the ListView handle them through OnItemClickListener? In RecyclerView, though, the ViewHolder is in a clear position to act as a row-level controller object that handles those kinds of details.

We saw earlier that LayoutManager handled positioning views, and ItemAnimator handled animating them. ViewHolder is the last piece: it’s responsible for handling any events that occur on a specific item that RecyclerView displays.