I want to convert List to List.
One of the existing methods is returning List and I
If you are willing to convert to an unmodifiable List, you can simply wrap your list with Collections.unmodifiableList. This works because this static method has a proper wildcard type ? extends T for the element type of the wrapped list (where T is the type of the result list).
Note that, in most cases, creating an unmodifiable view is what you should do, otherwise objects of different types (other than String) may be added in the original list (which should only hold Strings).