Creating my own launcher as personnal project (launcher3 fork) - Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

Hey everyone,
Due to the lockdown in my country I have to stay home. What a better way to do this than working on a project right ?
The idea is to create a simple launcher with the basic functionnality :
having an app drawer
home screen with dock
possibility to create folder on homescreen
possibility to remove app / folder from homescreen
bonus : possibility to add icon pack
You see, very basic as I said.
I started from scratch, but yesterday I asked on Lawnchair's community telegram and someone talked to me about Launcher3.
I didn't know this launcher and I discovered that a lot of launcher are based on Launcher3, they are all a fork from it.
This motivate me to do a fork to.
But I have a lot of problems to build the launcher itself. I clone the project, open it with Android Studio and I have errors from gradle, when I fix them I have other errors. I think I'm doing wrong but I searched online and I don't find any ressources that can help to start this project or give me clues to understand better.
I am a beginner in Android dev, but trust me I have a really strong motivation I don't want to hear "This is to difficult for you mate, try something else"
Thank you for reading me

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hello, you means you want to make a personal launcher project base on launcher3. so now what's your problem in make it build success?
Based on our previous experience, may be has fllow steps:
1.you need a aosp source(or you already have other rom code choose, it's ok), and build it;
2.get the framework.jar from the out path intermediates (for launcher3 has many class only system framework contain);
3.copy launcher3 code from aosp source to your owner path, and make an Android studio project;
4.copy the second step framework.jar to the launcher3 Android studio project(you can put it under app/libs/) and just compileOnly the framework.jar(we just need to declare some system class for compile, finally when the app work it still base on different devices owner framework in the system);
5.add flowing code in you build.gradle:
gradle.projectsEvaluated {
tasks.withType(JavaCompile) {
options.compilerArgs << '-Xbootclasspath/p:libs/framework.jar'
}
}
6.if you have a some v7 package implements may be some time will show you some <attr> conflict, like <attr name="icon"> conflict, just change it to <attr name="icon" format="string"> is ok.
Under normal conditions，above steps can help you to make your launcher3 project work well in AS, and also you can compare some open source in github, there has some launcher3 AS project. hope to work for you, if not work for you, you can show the error message you meet more detail, may be we can help to found out the problem

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Bro I think you can use jadx decompiler and any working laucher3 to show their source code. Learn from it how the stuffs work. Then start a new project from scratch in Android Studio.. Modify for your own needs.

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walker ice said:
hello, you means you want to make a personal launcher project base on launcher3. so now what's your problem in make it build success?
Based on our previous experience, may be has fllow steps:
1.you need a aosp source(or you already have other rom code choose, it's ok), and build it;
2.get the framework.jar from the out path intermediates (for launcher3 has many class only system framework contain);
3.copy launcher3 code from aosp source to your owner path, and make an Android studio project;
4.copy the second step framework.jar to the launcher3 Android studio project(you can put it under app/libs/) and just compileOnly the framework.jar(we just need to declare some system class for compile, finally when the app work it still base on different devices owner framework in the system);
5.add flowing code in you build.gradle:
gradle.projectsEvaluated {
tasks.withType(JavaCompile) {
options.compilerArgs << '-Xbootclasspath/p:libs/framework.jar'
}
}
6.if you have a some v7 package implements may be some time will show you some <attr> conflict, like <attr name="icon"> conflict, just change it to <attr name="icon" format="string"> is ok.
Under normal conditions，above steps can help you to make your launcher3 project work well in AS, and also you can compare some open source in github, there has some launcher3 AS project. hope to work for you, if not work for you, you can show the error message you meet more detail, may be we can help to found out the problem
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Hey,
Thank you for your answer. I clone launcher 3 from here : ht tps:// android.googlesource.com/ platform/ packages/ apps/ Launcher3
But I can built it on android studio, am I doing it wrong ? (I'm on Windows 10 btw)
I open the folder Launcher3 (from which I cloned) and AS ask me for gradle location ...
Thanks again.