App crashing when trying to use RecyclerView on android 5.0

This issue usually occurs when no LayoutManager was provided for the RecyclerView. You can do it like so:

final LinearLayoutManager layoutManager = new LinearLayoutManager(context);
layoutManager.setOrientation(LinearLayoutManager.VERTICAL);
recyclerView.setLayoutManager(layoutManager);

For me, I was having the same issue, the issue was that there was an unused RecyclerView in xml with view gone but I am not binding it to any adapter in Activity, hence the issue. It was solved as soon as I removed such unused recycler views in xml

i.e - I removed this view as this was not called in code or any adapter has been set

<android.support.v7.widget.RecyclerView
        android:layout_width="match_parent"
        android:layout_height="match_parent"
        android:id="@+id/rv_profileview_allactivities"
        android:visibility="gone" />

I experienced this crash even though I had the RecyclerView.LayoutManager properly set. I had to move the RecyclerView initialization code into the onViewCreated(...) callback to fix this issue.

@Override
public View onCreateView(LayoutInflater inflater, ViewGroup container,
                         Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    View rootView = inflater.inflate(R.layout.fragment_listing, container, false);
    rootView.setTag(TAG);
    return inflater.inflate(R.layout.fragment_listing, container, false);
}

@Override
public void onViewCreated(View view, Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onViewCreated(view, savedInstanceState);

    mLayoutManager = new LinearLayoutManager(getActivity());
    mLayoutManager.setOrientation(LinearLayoutManager.VERTICAL);

    mRecyclerView = (RecyclerView) view.findViewById(R.id.recyclerView);
    mRecyclerView.setItemAnimator(new DefaultItemAnimator());
    mRecyclerView.setLayoutManager(mLayoutManager);

    mAdapter = new ListingAdapter(mListing);
    mRecyclerView.setAdapter(mAdapter);
}

In my case it was not connected to 'final', but to the issue mentioned in @NemanjaKovačević comment to @aga answer. I was setting a layoutManager on data load and that was the cause of the same crash. After moving the layoutManager setup to onCreateView of my fragment the issue was fixed.

Something like this:

@Override
public View onCreateView(LayoutInflater inflater, ViewGroup container,
                             Bundle savedInstanceState)
{
...
mRecyclerView = (RecyclerView) rootView.findViewById(R.id.recycler);

mLayoutManager = new StaggeredGridLayoutManager(2,StaggeredGridLayoutManager.VERTICAL);
mRecyclerView.setLayoutManager(mLayoutManager);