Ecosyste.ms: Awesome

An open API service indexing awesome lists of open source software.

Awesome Lists | Featured Topics | Projects

https://github.com/gamemaker1/babble

Want an open source alternative to Whatsapp to stay in touch with small groups - your family, friends, office groups? This is an open source chat app built for Android using Firebase as the backend. You can change the code to point to your own instance of Firebase - that will make your data completely private to you.
https://github.com/gamemaker1/babble

Last synced: 10 days ago
JSON representation

Host: GitHub
URL: https://github.com/gamemaker1/babble
Owner: gamemaker1
License: gpl-3.0
Created: 2019-08-06T12:00:53.000Z (about 5 years ago)
Default Branch: master
Last Pushed: 2023-01-09T11:52:05.000Z (almost 2 years ago)
Last Synced: 2024-10-12T16:19:22.749Z (24 days ago)
Language: Java
Homepage:
Size: 31 MB
Stars: 4
Watchers: 1
Forks: 0
Open Issues: 6
Metadata Files:
- Readme: README.md
- License: LICENSE.md

Awesome Lists containing this project

README

        


  



# Babble

Want an open source alternative to Whatsapp to stay in touch with small groups - your family, friends, office groups? This is an open source chat app built for Android using Firebase as the backend. You can change the code to point to your own instance of Firebase - that will make your data completely private to you. 

# Features

**Sign-in/Sign-up** - Using email-password login. You can signup with your own email and password. Users signed up are called Babblers.

**Groups (Called Bubbles)** - Can be created by entering your friends' email address(es). It will also allow you to automatically send an email to the friend, alerting him/her via email that you have added him/her to the Bubble.

**Chatting** - You can send plain text messages and images from your phone to any Bubble (chat group). The Babble app also allows you to invoke the share functionality from any app, browser included, on your phone and share text/links with Babblers on the Bubble. 

**Todos** - You can add todos to each Bubble (group). Anyone in the Bubble can claim and complete the todos. 

**Privacy** - This app uses [Firebase](https://firebase.google.com/) to manage authentication and store its data. Firebase is completely secure and trusted by a large number of tech companies. None of your data is sold to any other companies. Ideally you should host it on your own instance of Firebase to keep data extremely private to yourself. If you directly use the app from the Playstore, it will be using a common instance of Firebase (which is secure and your data safe). 

# Screenshots























# Installation

Go to Google Play Store and search for 'Babble Open Source Chat App'.

# Creating your own instance of the app

To create your own database and storage on Firebase, follow these steps - (Ones in bold are mandatory and very important)

1. Download [Android Studios](https://developer.android.com/studio#downloads) on Linux, Mac, or Windows.

2. Open up Android Studios and click on 'Create A New Project'.

3. **Enter your own unique package name and app nickname. Also enable androidx artifacts for your project.**

4. Now open terminal. Go to the project directory and clone this repository into the directory by typing in `git clone https://github.com/gamemaker1/Babble`.

Note: You can also copy-paste the files into Android Studios without going into Terminal, but remember to copy the .java and res files. Copy the gradle dependencies only, and that too after step 13.

5. **Got to Android Studios and change the package name of each of the _.java_ files and the Android Manifest file to the one you had entered earlier while creating the project.**

6. Now go to [Firebase](https://firebase.google.com/) and press 'Get Started' or 'Go To Console' if you already hav an account.

7. Create a new project and name it whatever you like. When asked to enable Google Analytics, choose the option 'Not Now'.

8. Now go to Terminal and go to your project's subdirectory, app. Type in `firebase login`. Login to firebase in the popup window that opens. 

9. Type in `firebase init`. It will ask you which CLI feature you want to initialize. Choose 'Functions: Configure and deploy Cloud Functions'.

10. After that, choose the project that you just created in Firebase.

11. Then it will ask you:

  - What language would you like to use to write Cloud Functions? Answer:JavaScript

  - Do you want to use ESLint to catch probable bugs and enforce style? Answer:No

  - Do you want to install dependencies with npm now? Answer:Yes

12. If you had cloned the repo, then you can ignore this step (ignore step 12 only). For those who copy-pasted the files, got to your projects subdirectory app/functions and copy-paste the contents of the repo's index.js file to your index.js file in the functions directory. This is for the notifications.

13. Now, go to Firebase and select the 'Add App' option. Choose Android app and fill in the details. When asked to download the google-services.json file, place it under the app subdirectory. Then do the third step as it tells you. You can skip the fourth step of communicating with Google's servers.

14. Go to the file ChatActivity.java. Under the method 'onActivityResult', you will see a StorageReference variable called photoRef. Got to your Firebase project's Firebase Storage and paste the link there in place of the link in the '.getReferenceFrom('gs://...')' StorageReference.

You will finally have an instance that is completely private to you!!

# Known issues

These are known issues in the code. Contributors are welcome; please send me a pull request:

1. When you first install the app, the app will show the Home screen (`GroupsActivity`) with a `ProgressBar` going round and round forever. This is because you are not signed in and so, it cannot access the database. To get the app to work, you need to press the menu icon and then press the Sign Out option. This signs you out and gets you to the sign-in screen and then the app works smoothly.

2. When you add a friend, it deletes the entire info about the group, including the messages and todos, and then recreates the group with the same Bubble (Chat group) name and id and the list of people in the group. The reason behind this is that in the `GroupItem` class, there is a setter for setting an ArrayList as the list of the people in the Bubble. But that setter doesn't work, I have no idea why.

3. You cannot add multiple friends at once.

4. There are no settings for the user (notifications, change password, update app, view app info, etc.)

Apart from this, we still need to:

1. Create a web app using the same database and Auth providers and same interface.

2. Add support for [Solid](https://solid.inrupt.com/) (an initiative by Sir Tim Berners Lee) to store data. That way your data is private and portable. 

3. Add useful comments in the code to let others know what we want to do.

# License Info

Copyright (C) 2019  Vedant K

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify

it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by

the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or

(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,

but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of

MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the

GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License

along with this program.  If not, see .

**Thank you for contributing to or spreading word about this app!**