This list can be refreshed using the action menu. This project has a MainAcitivity building a ListView with all random data. Just clone and open the project in Android Studio (gradle). No need to always pop that runOnUiTrhead in. In simple cases you'll be updating your data from a button click or another activity/fragment. That is from a service or a non UI thread. However this is only required if you're working on this information from outside the UI thread. Other answers have examples on how to achieve this. It is true that this has to be called from the UI thread. It's really just an needless extra layer of difficulty in most cases. Some adapters like the ArrayAdapter already manage their own collection making it harder to get to the proper collection for updates.

I did find that working with an adapter that lets you manage the collection, like a BaseAdapter works better. So that is the place to look if you don't find changes coming through. The thing is this notifyDataSetChanged only works if the dataset has changed. If you're working with a database or service backend you'll have to call the method to retrieve the information again (or manipulate the in memory data) before calling the notifyDataSetChanged(). If this is just a collection you're keeping in memory check that you actually deleted from or added the item(s) to the collection before calling the notifyDataSetChanged(). If you fail to find the difference you need to check where the data in your adapter comes from. Believe me the ListView was properly updated.

If calling notifyDataSetChanged() doesn't work all the layout methods won't help either. The right thing to do (and luckily also marked as right answer) is to call notifyDataSetChanged() on your Adapter. Please ignore all the invalidate(), invalidateViews(), requestLayout().

Android studio listview vogella