Well, rather than getting into a debate on what constitutes "nothing special" or "side effect", I'll let the docs explain the details. http://redux.js.org/docs

Well, rather than getting into a debate on what constitutes "nothing special" or "side effect", I'll let the docs explain the details. http://redux.js.org/docs/advanced/AsyncActions.html http://redux.js.org/docs/advanced/AsyncActions.html Note however that it does say "This function doesn’t need to be pure; it is thus allowed to have side effects, including executing asynchronous API calls."