I'm not sure what the purpose of this channel is. ...

# android

[Manuel Pérez Alcolea]

I'm not sure what the purpose of this channel is. Most threads end up with a not kotlin but kotlin colored reaction because they're about something "Android-specific" and not Kotlin, I guess? But why would I create a thread here and not in a more suitable channel? If I need assistance with Flows, Compose, coroutines, etc. then there are more suitable channels for that. And the tooling for Android made or maintained by Jetbrains does not necessarily fall into the "*using Kotlin* to build Android apps" description

[Colton Idle]

I think I've asked some questions here in the past of like coroutines + viewModels and stuff like that. so i see this channel as more of a "kotin <> android integration" channel.

[Colton Idle]

but i do wish we had a channel for actual android dev. wish the android team would put up one of these slacks essentially where you could have some sort of contact with dev rel etc. but i guess that would get too crazy too fast.

[statmark56]

The not kotlin but kotlin colored folks simply loves trolling you

[kenkyee]

The reason is we get flooded by random stuff that's unrelated.

Remember that this is a Kotlin language slack put up by Jetbrains so their folks can help with issues related to Kotlin->Android integration. E.g., proguard, bytecode issues, compiler issues, kotlin gradle plugin issues etc.

Once you add random android questions that belong on stackoverflow on the android-united slack, it becomes a huge amount of noise for Jetbrains folks.

A great example is the next few messages after yours and the ones before yours. Put yourself in the feet of a Jetbrains developer....and this is all noise. And they leave. Which is what has mostly happened....

[Mez Pahlan]

One would imagine, in that case, a more suitable channel name could have been used?

#kotlin-android-integration / #kotlin-android-interop / or any specific integration issue channel name you can think of e.g. #kotlin-android-proguard etc.

I know naming is hard, but calling a channel #android and not expecting general Android questions is just asking for trouble.

[kenkyee]

+1 we've asked that the channel be renamed in #C0B8W32VA but the comment was this entire slack is named kotlinlang.slack.com and people wouldn't be ignorant enough to ask random android questions unrelated to kotlin 🤷

[Mez Pahlan]

but the comment was this entire slack is named kotlinlang.slack.com and people wouldn't be stupid enough to ask random android questions unrelated to kotlin 🤷

Yeah I get that this was the intention, but it's clearly not the reality. People do, and have been constantly, asking general Android related questions. I don't think it's helpful to label them as "stupid" especially if English isn't their first language and the nuance of what you're trying to get across is perhaps lost of many non native English speakers. Heck, even native English speakers have been confused by this.

If we've tried something..... it doesn't work in the way we intended........ I don't the see problem in changing the approach. Surely that's far better than the constant not kotlin but kotlin colored messages that don't do anything but confuse a large number of users.

[kenkyee]

changed stupid to ignorant, but good point.

[kenkyee]

Would love to have the channel name changed too...