ListActivity vs ListView [closed]

Question

I'm learning android programming, and here is my doubt: I can create a full screen ListView with the ListView object itself, or through a ListActivity.

Is there one that is preferable to the other, whether it be for efficiency reasons, code maintainability, or Android best-practices?

Answer 1

If it's fullscreen, it should probably be a ListActivity.

It's not always clear how to divide parts of an app into Activities, but one Activity per screen is pretty common.¹ You likely shouldn't be showing a fullscreen ListView over other Views in a single Activity.

Note that ListActivity is just a convenience to save a bit of boilerplate code for a common Activity layout. The layout and IDs are preset, so that you don't have to create them. However, if you were designing an app that included a fullscreen list, but custom Activities (maybe everything subclasses a BaseActivity class that handles checking authorization), there's no harm in making your own Activity with a fullscreen ListView as its layout. (In that case, I'd recommend looking at the features of ListActivity like the empty view as it's more complex than merely a single ListView.)

^{1. This is actually more complex nowadays because Fragments are the norm and have even fuzzier boundaries, but we'll leave them out of this discussion.}