Question

That is, will it inflate the layout immediately in a blocking way, and call onInflateFinished() before returning, or does it return immediately and schedule the inflation for later?

Answer 1

Inflate is synchronous. There’s no point of it to be asynchronous, not to mention getting return value, would become quite complicated.

See docs:

Returns:

The root View of the inflated hierarchy. If root was supplied, this is the root View; otherwise it is the root of the
inflated XML file.