When you watch carefully, the insert animation in a RecyclerView works in 2 steps :
1) White space expands to make room for the new item
2) The item is animated in
Same thing for removal, reverse order
Examples :
https://github.com/wasabeef/recyclerview-animators
http://www.grokkingandroid.com/first-glance-androids-recyclerview/
The second step can be customized easily with the ItemAnimator class, but I cannot find any information on the first step. It happens to be very ugly with my layout (continuous color on the side).
LayoutAnimationController seems like a possible candidate to manage the first step, but adding a new one does not change anything, and following it with logs in setLayoutAnimationListener stays silent.
I cannot even disable this step, which would allow me to manage the animation manually in onBindViewHolder.
Actually sometimes the first step does not seem to fire, but I cannot explain why. I manage all the operations with notifyItem*, no notifyDataSetChanged.
