For those among us that belong to the developer community, some good news.
The beloved developer platform GitHub has an Android app and yes, you can download it straight from the Google Play Store (see link below).
For those not in the know, GitHub is a repository hosting platform (next time you hear your nerdy friends talk about repos loosely, you’ll have an idea). A layman way of explaining what it is is saying that it is a social network for programmers. That’s too simplistic but it helps paint a picture of the code sharing, publishing and collaboration – forking, pulling requests, discussing patches – that are driven by the platform.
The name, GitHub, is derived from git, a distributed version control system for tracking changes in source code during software development.
If you have flashed an Android custom ROM, chances are, it began its life over there. Heck, if you use just about any app, there’s a high likelihood that its developers use GitHub to maintain it. It is also where some of us go to peep version histories of some of the apps we cover.
That said, all of that, has been packaged nicely and made available as a mobile app.
The app has been available in beta since January and now it is being made available to everyone in its first stable release.
Given the state of the world right now – quarantines and whatnot – the release couldn’t have happened at a better time. Especially for the students that have to be home but are usually reliant on school resources like labs in order to keep their projects going in the absence of hardware of their own.
While GitHub mobile won’t be replacing the desktop browser version any time soon, developers will appreciate the easy access to their inbox while on the go, being able to review bug fixes and merge code on the go, among other things.
