Enter RecyclerView

RecyclerView, on its own, does very little other than help manage view recycling (e.g., row recycling of a vertical list). It delegates almost everything else to other classes, such as:

• a layout manager, responsible for organizing the views into various structures (vertical list, grid, staggered grid, etc.)
• an item decorator, responsible for applying effects and light positioning to the views, such as adding divider lines between rows in a vertical list
• an item animator, responsible for animated effects as the model data changes
• and so on

Through “adapter” and “view-holder” classes, we teach RecyclerView what should go into the list rows, grid cells, or whatever. RecyclerView then handles the scrolling and recycling for us.