What does LayoutInflater in Android do?

The LayoutInflater class in Android is used to instantiate the contents of layout XML files into their corresponding View objects[1][2][3]. It takes an XML file as input and builds the View objects from it[2].

In other words, LayoutInflater is responsible for reading the XML file that describes a layout (or GUI element) and creating the actual objects that correspond to it, making the object visible within an Android app[2].

Some key points about LayoutInflater:

• It is never used directly. Instead, you retrieve a LayoutInflater instance using Activity.getLayoutInflater() or Context.getSystemService()[1][3]
• For performance reasons, view inflation relies heavily on pre-processing of XML files done at build time. It only works with an XmlPullParser returned from a compiled resource (R.something file), not a plain XML file at runtime[1][5]
• It is not thread-safe and a given instance should only be acce...