Is a simple 50 item list enough to justify using a ListView?

In the Google I/O 2010 talk about ListView they say you might not need to use a ListView with a bounded and reasonable number of rows. They state if you are dealing with a reasonable number of rows it is possible to just lay them out in a Scrol开发者_开发问答lView.

I'm curious what people find "reasonble length" means in practice.

Would a list of 50 items with each row's views just having a few strings be reasonable to layout without using a ListView? How about 12?

I'm used to using UITableViews on iPhone for most UI so I'm inclined to use ListViews on Android but I also want to be aware it might be overkill for some scenarios and I have a really limited understanding of perf on android presently.

ListView is really the best option for anything over 3 items, it is a good option for even 2 or 3 items. If not you'll end up writing a bunch of code that converts indexes to individual variables instead of arrays, database rows, or other data structure.

It's not only about the number of items but also about whether or not your data collection will be dynamically updated. If you know you will never update the list while it's on screen and it doesn't have many items then a LinearLayout will do just fine.

In the Google I/O 2010 talk about ListView they say you might not need to use a ListView with a bounded and reasonable number of rows. They state if you are dealing with a reasonable number of rows it is possible to just lay them out in a ScrollView.

Hmmm, I can understand the logic up to a point but in reality using a ListActivity, for example, as your base class makes things very simple. OK, if you have a static list of only a dozen or so lines of text (one for each list 'item') then using a ScrollView containing TextViews would be an alternative but in reality using the adapter approach to ListViews is a lot more flexible in my opinion.

Would a list of 50 items with each row's views just having a few strings be reasonable to layout without using a ListView? How about 12?

No, if each list item has a few strings to be laid out then custom list item layouts together with a ListView and a custom adapter are basically a must.