Learning Material Design

Chapter 5. Lists, Cards, and Data

Modern smartphones and tablets are capable of accessing and managing large amounts of data, and due to the limited screen space on most of these devices, handling large data sets poses an interesting challenge. Prior to Android 5, these data sets were usually handled with ListView, but this was notoriously inefficient and so Android 5 introduced RecyclerView, which intelligently manages large lists and grids.

RecyclerView is also more flexible than ListView, as we can create custom layouts for individual lists or grid items, and one of the best ways to achieve this is with CardView, which also came out with Android 5 and has become synonymous with Material Design.

As we see how these views are implemented, we will ...