When displaying a screen with various sections ordered vertically, where each section looks different than the other (so maybe recycling items wouldn't use an actual recycle but a recreation), would be any true benefit to use a recycling view group, taking into consideration that no large bitmaps will be displayed, instead of an plain ScrollView?
I suspect there is a performance impact when using ListView for example, that might affect scrolling, and an slight increased memory usage, maybe a delay (only when layout is measured - not that often) when using ScrollView, but are these that significant for 7 sections, for example, where 3 of them are visible at a time?
Thank you!
This is mostly speculation, but I would consider it relatively well-informed speculation.
Let's assume you have 1000 sections, each of them different from the other. My understanding is that both ScrollView and ListView will have "problems" here, though the sort of problems they'll each have will be different.
ScrollView will measure and lay out all of its children up front (which will probably be quite expensive and will probably cause quite a delay in your UI). And it will have all of those views inflated and hanging around in memory (which might cause your process to crash with an OutOfMemoryError). But if the delay were acceptable and if you had enough memory for everything, at this point your app should run perfectly smoothly (i.e. no frames dropped when scrolling/flinging).
ListView, on the other hand, will only measure and lay out those children that are currently on-screen, as well as a few extras that are immediately off-screen. So initial performance should be quite fast and memory consumption should be quite low. But you mention that each section is "different", so view recycling won't "work". In practice, this would mean ignoring the convertView parameter of getView() and inflating a new view each time. If your sections are complicated, this could easily cause frame skips during scrolling/flinging.
But you mention that your app will have only 7 sections, or about 2.5 screen's worth of UI. For such a small number, I think worrying about performance before simply trying something out is silly; I suspect that a ScrollView holding a LinearLayout holding all seven sections would work perfectly well on all modern devices.