Not really. Channels have a single function, to transport data to the first available consumer. With observables, there's a whole world on top of that. The sim

Not really. Channels have a single function, to transport data to the first available consumer. With observables, there's a whole world on top of that. The simplest observable, when subscribed to, will cause the producer of content to start the production. If 3 consumers subscribe to an observable, then the producer will do it's work three times, once per subscription. Compare that to a channel, where a producer has no way of knowing if a consuer is available. Generally, they start the work immediately and try to stuff the result in a channel, regardless of whether there's a consumer on the other end. Moreover, when another consumer uses the same channel, you have two consumers fighting for the same result. And since observables are transformable, there's a plethora of operators available (at least in rxjava). If you take the previous example, you might want to share the observable, replaying the last result, so that regardless of how many consumers subscribe to it, the producer will only do the work once, and the consumers will receive the same results. It will be quite a bit harder, though not impossible, to implement the same thing with channels.