Introduction

Lists are one of the most common UI elements in mobile apps. Think of any app you use daily: You’re always seeing one form or another of a list, be it a list of songs in your music streaming app, a carousel of images in a social media app, or a grid of pictures in your photos app.

Given the popularity of list UIs, it’s important to ensure that your implementation performs well and efficiently. In this module, you’ve already built a basic list layout using the Row and Column composables. Now, it’s time to learn how to build a more efficient version of the same layout that can handle larger data sets and that supports dynamic refresh.

In the world of the Android UI toolkit, you might have worked with RecyclerView to implement an efficient, high-performance, dynamic list. Working with RecyclerViews to ensure that a dynamic refresh for items happened efficiently involved a lot of complicated logic. Jetpack Compose solves this with the lazy variants of the row and column composables called LazyRow and LazyColumn.

In this lesson, you’ll:

• Identify the purpose of a List.
• Learn to use a Lazy Row.
• Learn to use a Lazy Column.