is there a sort of a "sideffect flatmap"? i.e. like doOnNext but with observable, where I want to execute it but want to still keep upstream returned value

I’m not sure this is what you want, but

flatMap

has an overload where you can pass a `resultSelector`: http://reactivex.io/RxJava/javadoc/io/reactivex/Observable.html#flatMap-io.reactivex.functions.Function-io.reactivex.functions.BiFunction-

thx