How To Fork An Android Project: GitHub - Hive Programmers

Greetings to everyone and welcome to my favorite Science community online, StemSocial.

It's @skyehi and I'm really excited to be back to continue my series on Android App development tutorials for beginners.

Original Image Source by Pexels from Pixabay

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Today's episode is inspired by two main things.

The first is the entire Hive Blockchain. If you're familiar with history you probably already know how the Hive Blockchain came into existence.

Hive is a project that was not built from ground up by its developers, it was actually "forked" from an already existing Blockchain called "Steemit". I'v been on Steemit before and I've not the similarities between the two platforms.

Hive was forked from Steemit in a sense that it was basically duplicated. The code structure used for Steemit is what was used for Hive. Hive of course is very different from Steemit in a number of ways.

The second thing that inspired today's blog is my intention to teach followers or readers of this blog, an easier way to develop Apps.

Forking open source Apps is the easiest waybto develop Apps. There are quite a number of websites that hosts open sourcs Apps which is free for developers to take and fork.

Of course it is already ethical to mention original creator of the project before publishing the forked one.

If you don't want to go through the stress of building an App from ground up, you can easily find an App similar to the one you intend to build and fork it

From there you can build your desired App on top of that.
The most popular if websites that host open source projects or Android Apps to fork is GitHub. You can easily visit their website and view all open sourcs projects there.

• In today's blog, I wanted to teach on exactly to fork an existing open source project in GitHub through Android Studio IDE.

Let's get started with today's work shall we.

In this project, we'll simply extract some repositories to a remote storage on our PC. It should be the same PC you have Android Studio properly installed on guys.

Then use the Android Studio IDE to make some changes and push it back to the remote repository.

Then afterwards we can make a pull request to another remote storage location. If there are any issues, please let me know in the comments.

Forking the repository

Open the open source project page. This is the project you wish to fork.

Fork this repository into your GitHub repository. It's pretty simple, the fork button will show at the top if your open the project.

Open Android Studio

I'll assume you already have Android Studio Installed on your PC. Just double click it to open.

Now guys this ain't going to be the usual steps where we always click in "Create A new Project"

Do not create a new project, but select "Check Project" from version control.

Afterwards select GitHub and log in.

Copy and paste the clone link from the forked repository.

Select the appropriate folder location and click "Clone" to open the project with Android Studio

That's it guys, Android Studio will load the open source project and you'll be able to see all the codes used in developing the App.

You can easily run the entire project either using an emulator or Physical Android device.

Of course if you wish to edit the source code and the App, you can do so with caution. If you need assistance with changing the package name of the App to publish the new App as your own, please let me know in the comments guys.

The package name of your App is in the Gradle file of the project.

Make all the necessary package name changes and click on the sync button.

One thing I've noticed out if experience forking many projects is that some of them come with some errors or unfinished codes.

You need to have experience in working your way around them. Of course not all of them have errors but always exercise caution when forking projects.

Thank you so much for reading guys. Despite the fact that this might be a relatively short blog compared to my other blog episodes, I believe this is the most impactful for developers.

You can come up with full fledged Music player Apps, browser Apps and many other productivity Apps and even games by forking open source projects.

Learning how to fork will help you understand how codes of complex Apps are written.

I hope you enjoyed this brief blog guys.

Thank you all for the support. To my friends @stickupcurator or @stickupboys and everyone else

Have A Great Day And Catch You Next Time On StemSocial. Goodbye 👨‍💻

You Can Follow Me @skyehi For More Like This And Others