It's pretty straightforward to get started using ExoPlayer by following the library's Hello world! documentation. Once you throw Android's lifecycles and state management into the mix, however, things quickly get more complex. It's easy to accidentally leak memory and hard to coordinate things in a way that's efficient and looks good in the UI. And that's just for playback of videos on a simple screen! Combining ExoPlayer with a ViewPager or RecyclerView adds a whole 'nother layer of complexity.

With this repository I wanted to demonstrate a simple app showing how to do YouTube Shorts/TikTok style video paging in a way that reconciles Android lifecycles and state management.

The approach I took is to reuse the same ExoPlayer and PlayerView instance for all pages. The ExoPlayer instance lives in and is managed by MainViewModel, and a singular PlayerView gets attached to whichever ViewHolder is active on the current page. Having only one PlayerView made things simple because I didn't have to depend on any RecyclerView.Adapter callbacks like onViewAttached/DetachedToWindow which can get tricky to coordinate.

I've been a bit more verbose with comments than I typically would in this repository, for the purposes of clarity.