Is this question really off-topic?

Question

This question has a bunch of development-related keywords like "build" "development" and "package".

However it is not really a question about "developing for Android", it's about "developing on Android". Using Android as a development platfrom is, in the concept of Android, using, not developing.

It's asking about missing shared library symbols, and after searching on Google, I found the answer is "Build ZeroMQ from scratch by yourself". This answer is, however, off-topic on Android. But it does not affect the question.

In short, the question is similar to

I wrote a program on Android using Termux, and the dynamic linker said it's missing a symbol "pw->pw_gecos".

So what? I can well remember Dan Hulme ♦ said (from my memory, exact wording may vary)

If your question is about using Android as a development platform, it's OK. But if you ask something like "I wrote this code on my Android phone, what's wrong with it", it's clearly off-topic

I can't find the quotation above but I'm fairly sure it's said by Dan Hulme somewhere on this site (A.M.SE).

Answer 1

Development related questions are always flagged as "Off topic" in AE.

Either you are developing "for" Android or "on" Android, it's a question referring some "Development".

Just took an example:

You can install compilers in Android devices. Lets assume you need to compile a program written in any language (commonly it's a development process). You can build using your Android device, but what if it didn't compile properly? You can not ask those compilation issues in any of the Android platform forums, because its not related to "Operating system" which you use to build your program. Its purely coding related issue. Better to be posted in coding forums.

Similarly here "It doesn't matter you build it 'for' or 'on' Android", OP tries to compile an app, so needs to be flagged as Off topic.

Answer 2

I don't actually participate on the main site much, so I held my tongue the first the first few times I saw this question, but... disallowing developing-on-Android questions simply because of the word "development" feels like an incredibly prescriptivist view of the rules to me.

Setting aside the the specific main site post that led to this question, and looking at the general case: this site is for people who are using Android devices, rather than developing for Android devices. Whether writing a program on an Android device, playing a game on an Android device or watching a movie on an Android device, the person involved is acting as a user of the device, not a developer of that device. For all we know, the development taking place may not be for that device at all, or even be mobile-related; after a few minutes of searching, I found Android-based IDEs for C++, JavaScript and C#.