RecyclerView

RecyclerView:

The RecyclerView widget is a more advanced and flexible version of ListView. This widget is a container for displaying large data sets that can be scrolled very efficiently by maintaining a limited number of views. Use the RecyclerView widget when you have data collections whose elements change at run-time based on user action or network events.

A layout manager positions item views inside a RecyclerView and determines when to reuse item views that are no longer visible to the user. To reuse (or recycle) a view, a layout manager may ask the adapter to replace the contents of the view with a different element from the data set. Recycling views in this manner improves performance by avoiding the creation of unnecessary views or performing expensive findViewById() lookup.

RecyclerView provides these built-in layout managers:

1. LinearLayoutManager shows items in a vertical or horizontal scrolling list.
2. GridLayoutManager shows items in a grid.
3. StaggeredGridLayoutManager shows items in a staggered grid.

Support older Version:
At the time of writing, less than 2% of Android devices run Android Lollipop. However, thanks to the v7 Support Library, you can use the RecyclerView and CardView widgets on devices that run older versions of Android by adding the following lines to the dependencies section in your project's build.grade file:

1- compile 'com.android.support:cardview-v7:21.0.+'
2- compile 'com.android.support:recyclerview-v7:21.0.+'

ListView vs RecyclerView

1. Reuses cells while scrolling up/down - this is possible with implementing View Holder in the      listView adapter, but it was an optional thing, while in the RecycleView it's the default way of  writing adapter

2. Decouples list from its container - so you can put list items easily at run time in the different containers (linearLayout, gridLayout) with setting LayoutManager.

3. Animates common list actions - Animations are decoupled and delegated to ItemAnimator.