Mark Murphy

flow() creates a cold Flow. Nothing happens until something starts collecting the output of the Flow — in this case, the collect() call in main(). The events only exist if something is collecting them.

each Flow created by flow() can only be collected once — we cannot have multiple collectors.

These are fairly severe limitations.

SharedFlow is a hot flow that can have multiple consumers, with each consumer seeing the same sequence of emitted events as any other active consumer at the time.