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# android

[Slackbot]

This message was deleted.

[orangy]

Please don’t ask questions unrelated to Kotlin in this community, there are plenty of other resources for general Android questions

[james]

that guy has deleted his message, but I have a question / observation on this.. I think a lot of people like to ask Android questions here because they're here for the Kotlin chat, but they have an Android question and really there's nowhere else with quite so many Android developers active at any one time. I understand the suggestion is to try StackOverflow or other Android community forums but sometimes that kind of thing takes days for a response. I think people like asking on Slack because they can get a quick response. There is, AFAIK, no other Slack group of Android developers that has anywhere near this number of active users.
Anyway, just an observation.

[purereborn]

There's this slack group: https://android-united.slack.com

It's got 8K in the general chat and has similar numbers in other more specific chat rooms.

[james]

@purereborn I thought it was more like 6K not 8K?

I guess it would be nice if Google gave their blessing to one of the many Android communities though, by listing one on their developer resources site. I suspect it can be overwhelming to developers new to the platform when they have their choice of 10 different Slack groups, or IRC, or G+, or Google Groups forum.

[james]

anyway, I'm not suggesting we change the rules here at all, I'm just offering a best-guess for why we get so many people asking general android questions in here.. I think this slack channel is the largest (in terms of active users at any one time) android developers chat group

[Francisco Saldaña]

It might also just be a symptom of StackOverflow not offering a 'real-time' feel. I wish there was a way to combine the easy cross-referencability of SO with the realtime feel of Slack.

[Regan Russell]

android-united.slack.com

[orangy]

Yeah, I understand (and proud) that we’ve built such a big and responsive community, so that it is attractive even for pure Android questions 🙂 But I don’t think it is sustainable if we allow for any topics besides Kotlin. If we get here another 10K Android developers and allow questions on all Android topics, it really will loose all those properties people like here. It’s up to Google I think to decide how to build an Android-specific place with similar feedback loop somewhere else, but I’m not sure it would really work on their scale. But if you have any ideas on how to scale that, please share with us and we will also let @jw know 😉

[matej]

@james you hit the nail on the head with where my question came from. It was definitely out of frustration because I had spent a couple of days working on this issue, talking to people in real life and have tried stackoverflow to no avail. It was kind of a last ditch 3 AM effort, given that this is the biggest real-time android dev community that I'd known at that moment. @orangy I definitely understand your point, and I can see that posting here was wrong, that's why I've deleted the question. I've requested an invite from Android-United since then, and hope someone there will be able to help.