Building Kreate

When you want to have your own changes in Kreate, then building your own app is your option.

✅ Prerequisites

warning

You shouldn't attempt to build the app with a computer that has less than 6GB of RAM.

The build process will slow down significantly and may result in failure, or the system will terminate it to preverse resources.

1. A computer
2. *Internet

* Only needed to download dependencies. No internet connection required to build the app

📋 Checklist

1. Download & install Java 21 (or above)
2. Have a clone of the repo locally
3. Register release notes

Register release notes

Kreate requires a release_notes.txt to be included at build time. This file contains all the changes made between last version and this version

This file doesn't stay in the repo to prevent the build from accidentally including old release notes. Kind of a fool-proof step

For personal build, you can just copy any text file from fastlane/metadata/android/en-US/changelogs/ and paste it in composeApp/src/androidMain/res/raw/release_notes.txt

File naming

The file must be naled release_notes.txt for it to work

🔠 Your options

There's no difference between these 2 options, only their sizes. Find explanation here

Release (compressed)

This is the recommended way

Pros	Cons
Smaller build size	Slow build time
	Consumes more resources during build process

Now execute this command within project's folder to start the build Kreate:

./gradlew assembleGithubRelease

You'll get this once it's completed

BUILD SUCCESSFUL in 1m 22s
71 actionable tasks: 28 executed, 43 up-to-date

Your file is now available in composeApp/build/outputs/apk/github/release/Kreate-release.apk

Uncompressed

Pros	Cons
Faster to build	Bigger build size
Consumes less resources during build process

Now execute this command within project's folder to start the build Kreate:

./gradlew assembleGithubUncompressed

You'll get this once it's completed

BUILD SUCCESSFUL in 1m 22s
71 actionable tasks: 28 executed, 43 up-to-date

Your file is now available in composeApp/build/outputs/apk/github/uncompressed/Kreate-uncompressed.apk

✍️ Signing your app

Android will not allow you to install unsigned APK willy-nilly. Steps shown above didn't cover it, and there's currently no documents that show you either.

But here's a tutorial from Medium.

🏁 Final step

Copy signed APK to your phone and start the installation.

If you have another instance of Kreate on your phone, you might be asked to remove before installing this version.

Only when you didn't change namespace and packageId, which you didn't if you followed this article alone

🪲 Issues

If you encounter any issue during build process. Please submit an issue ticket