Mobile App Template For Blockchain

Desired Outcome

To make Cardano dapps accessible to the global population on iOS and android with rich native experiences

Blocking problem

Teams are having to keep up with innovation on the blockchain, and don't have resources to create mobile apps plus web clients.

Costs of the problem

Less adoption and accessibility for Cardano, especially in Mobile first continents like Africa and South America. The global economy was an estimated $84 Trillion in 2020, (*1) with North America only contributing a fraction of the total. (*2)

Evidence

https://www.cnn.com/2012/10/04/tech/mobile/africa-mobile-opinion/index.html, https://www.pri.org/stories/2012-07-19/more-chinese-use-internet-mobile-phones-computers, https://medium.com/seedstars/mobile-and-internet-penetration-in-latin-america-part-1-541b8947b3f4, *1 https://www.statista.com/statistics/268750/global-gross-domestic-product-gdp/, *2 https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO

We will create a base level app infrastructure that can easily conform to the basic needs of an enterprise grade app capable of supporting hundreds of thousands of users using the latest technology like GraphQL, React Native and TypeScript. This will expedite the time to market for many projects in development for Cardano. Our first partnership will be with a ticket sales and exchange platform that is also separately seeking funding in this round.

We will leverage many open source technologies to build a flexible application framework to help teams deploy their applications on mobile devices and reach the billions of people who only have internet access via a mobile device. This will free up resources for many existing projects to focus on smart contracts and web clients while driving adoption for all.

The entirety of the funding will go towards supporting the development of this project, by hiring ~3 frontend mobile developers who will work remotely for a duration of 1 year. Any excess funding will be used to pursue partnerships with additional projects and to support a coordinator role between the mobile app developers and dapp developers.

Roadmap:

1 month: Begin scaffolding out the base layer app, with considerations for an enterprise grade environment, such as staging/production/mock environments, authentication and navigation.

3 month: By the end of month three, we will have developed a modular and flexible component library without any strong design decisions so that it can be extended for a variety of brand needs and use cases in the future.

6 month: In 6 months time we will have integrated the components into the first version of the application for our first dapp partner (a ticket marketplace), set up continuous deployment and integration, and ship the first version of the client to the iOS and Android app stores. We will also have extended the basic architecture of the app for considerations such as accessibility, integrated it with the backend services to talk to the smart contracts and communicate data between the client and the server.

12 months: By month 12 we will have iterated and expanded on the initial design and feature set of the first partner app (ticket marketplace), as well as expanded documentation for the basic application framework and component library, including providing an open source repository for other Cardano Dapp projects to leverage to get their project on mobile quicker. Important to note is the same basic app architecture can also be used to make native apps on apple WatchOS, macOS, Windows, and a variety of smart TV operating systems such as Samsung Tizen and AndroidTV. It will also support reverse compiling into web apps, allowing teams to potentially use just one code base to ship a native client to almost any operating system widely used today. The first app should launch around June 2022, with the open source framework being available to others by December 2022.

Success for this project will be to partner with at least one existing Cardano project and working with them to bring a mobile application to market (we already have identified a potential initial partner, a ticket marketplace and exchange, which is also seeking funding in this round), while creating a basic framework that can be reused for other partners in the future. Our primary KPI will be to release one well-designed, accessible, performant and user-friendly cross-platform (iOS and android) app for a partner Dapp project. Our secondary KPI will be to form a second partnership and develop documentation for other projects to easily leverage the work we have done, by open-sourcing the foundation of the initial app to bring subsequent projects to market on iOS and android quicker and more easily, with many edge cases and enterprise production environment considerations already handled. We expect the secondary KPI to be hit in the 12 month timeframe, after we successfully ship version one of the first partner project. We believe this will impact the Cardano ecosystem by removing much of the redundant work required to make an enterprise grade native mobile client application, helping the ecosystem to be reached by more people, with more projects much faster. By leveraging our experience to provide this foundation to others we can grow the community faster and provide higher quality mobile apps as an ecosystem with less total resources.