// the find
mitchtabian/Android-Instagram-Clone
Develop your own Instagram Clone App
A Java Android app that replicates core Instagram features — photo sharing, user profiles, follow system, likes, comments, and a main feed — built on top of Firebase for auth, database, and storage. It exists as a companion to a YouTube tutorial series, not as production-ready code. The author prominently warns against copying it.
Firebase integration covers the full auth/storage/realtime-database stack in one place, which is useful as a learning reference for how these services connect. The feature breadth is reasonable for a tutorial project — it gets through gallery picker, camera capture, feed pagination, and follow relationships. The per-lecture git tag structure lets you check out the code at each step of the course rather than diffing against a completed final state. The video compressor and materialcamera code shows how to handle media pipeline work without relying entirely on third-party SDKs.
The author's own README says the code uses many poor practices and they don't maintain it — that's not false modesty; the Utils package is a grab-bag of static helpers and God-class adapters that don't separate concerns at all. Last push was 2023 on a Java codebase using deprecated patterns like ListView and SectionsPagerAdapter instead of RecyclerView and ViewPager2, so someone learning from this will learn things Android itself has moved away from. No Kotlin, no Jetpack Compose, no ViewModel/LiveData/StateFlow — the architecture predates the current Android ecosystem by several years. If your Firebase project's security rules aren't locked down (and they aren't in any tutorial), this app exposes all user data to anyone with a valid token.