Cast result findViewById android method

Question

Why do we always have to cast the value returned by the method findViewById(id) ? The method already returns a view, as I\'ve seen in google reference :

Answer 1

View is the common superclass of other view classes such as ImageView. In object-oriented polymorphism, you can substitute a specific instance e.g. ImageView with the superclass. This is useful in generic APIs such as findViewById() return value.

Downcasting to a more specific type in Java requires an explicit cast.