As we build Blockstack, our community has consistently requested mobile-friendly dapps. With applications like messaging, photo-sharing, email, and wallets, mobile functionality is critical to adopting a wider user base. @yukan and I are really excited to share with you our first steps to take Blockstack mobile, by introducing a framework that lets developers build mobile apps on Android and iOS. This is the first step of our delivery on Phase 1 of our mobile plans.
How it works
Blockstack mobile software development kits (SDKs) allow you to develop decentralized Blockstack applications native to your favorite mobile platform. You can deliver the high-quality mobile experience your users have come to expect while ensuring user data stays decoupled from your applications. Privacy and data ownership will remain inherent to the experience.
With these previews, you can implement basic Blockstack authentication and storage in your apps. This means that after opening a web-based version of the Blockstack authenticator software, users can approve or deny an app’s request for authentication. The Blockstack integration tools allow for in-app sign-in, ensuring that users don’t have to leave your app. Your app will be able to read and write both encrypted and unencrypted data from the user’s Gaia storage hub to a dedicated data bucket.
While developing your app with this preview, you’ll want to create a Blockstack ID in your device’s web browser by visiting https://browser.blockstack.org before signing in. We’ll also be adding additional functionality to both the Android and iOS SDKs so that it matches the functionality of our platform reference library, blockstack.js.
We’ve written instructions for both iOS and Android and created example apps to get you up and running quickly!
The road ahead
Last week, our first developers and contributors started building on iOS and Android.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be shipping an update to our browser that will integrate with these mobile SDKs to create a seamless mobile onboarding experience. This will make it incredibly low-friction to onboard new users onto your mobile app.
Later this year, we’ll start delivering on Phase 2 of our mobile plan, which will allow users to fully manage their identity and storage on Blockstack mobile apps. They’ll be able to migrate their data in their device browser into different applications.
We’re really excited to see what you build with these mobile SDKs and look forward to your feedback, Github issues, and pull requests!
If you’re interested in helping us build a decentralized mobile future, we’re hiring iOS and Android engineers to work on and lead our mobile initiatives.
