What Blockchain projects run in native mobile apps & What are the challenges in implementing it?

Question

I am looking for the list of blockchain projects which are implemented in mobile apps natively. If you can find some, please point me to the list. If not, please let me know why there are no much blockchain projects implemented in mobile natively. Could it be due to performance, gas cost, complexity etc?

Answer 1

There are many risks that you as mobile app developer need to take care of when you ship your DApp in a form of mobile application.

1: Security - building your own app for blockchain means you have to built key management by yourself.

In current state of DApp, we have MetaMask, Cipher browser, Status browser, Trust browser and many others. The main problem that they're trying to solve is account management, the private key management, recovery process & good UX.

All of these need to be taken care of by yourself if you want allow your users to sign up for an account aka creating private key and store it securely in the phone. If hackers managed to reverse engineer and exploit your mobile app, they will be able to crack down the private key vault (the place where you store the private keys for your customers in their phones). You are screwed.

MetaMask and the gang above have experts that know what they are doing and always put security as their main pillar in the engineering process. Apart from that, they also have design team that always come out with better UX ideas so that everyone can adopt blockchain easily.

Bottom line, if you have security and design experties in your team that know well how to handle the key management, recovery process (mnemonic/seed phrases) & etc, it's probably a good idea to build your own inside your mobile app. Otherwise, I strongly recommend you just build web DApps and leverage MetaMask or DApp browsers above.

2: Trust - the idea of blockchain itself it to make everything decentralize and transparent. When you build a mobile app for your DApp, means you making it centralize. Your solution lives somewhere, in a server.

You will be relying on Apple and Google everytime you want to push app updates. Imagine you are an iOS developer and Apple is taking very long time to review and approve your app update submission? There's nothing much you can do because you are in centralized/close loop environment.

If you make it as web based DApp, you can deploy your DApp updates at any time you want. In addition to that, you also can host it to IPFS or Swarm to make it really decentralized application.

The beauty of not making it as a mobile app here is, your users can browse the code because all they have in their browser are static files; HTML, CSS and JS. Your users can tell if you are doing something bad in your code. Because they can right click on your web DApp and see the page source.

But if you are doing this as mobile app, your users can't really know what is 'behind' the app and you will find hard times to convince them later that they are in a good company.

3: Development - Web3JS is the most popular and stable project right now. It acts like a bridge layer between your DApp UI and the blockchain. And of course, it's written and needs to be implemented in JS.

Even now we started to see Web3 has been ported out to many other flavors i.e. for Swift and Kotlin, they are still new. Means, you will spend a lot of man hours later trying to debug and solve issues that only less people know to help/fix it.

To share my experience, I'm a Rubyist and there are some Web3 flavors for Ruby now. But, from what I've tested, they are still far from perfect and stable and at last, I decided to port everything to Web3JS for front-end components and Go for back-end. components.

FYI, the Ethereum Geth client is written in Go, check-out go-ethereum project. That means, everything that you need to do later i.e. creating transaction, signing transaction, querying blocks/transactions, creating/retrieving private key & etc has been tested and being used in real production. At any time when you are stuck, you can go ahead, read the source code of go-ethereum to learn how they do specific thing (the list above).

I'm not going againts all these new flavors. What I'm trying to tell you here is, it's going to take time for all this new flavors to get matured and stable enough. My advice for you now, if you want to do DApp, use Web3JS. If you need some back-end work (your centralized server <> blockchain), use Go.

I hope this helps!