Summer of Protocols

So one of the moonshot things I think onchain tech needs is a native phoneOS. The horrendous and fragile flow of web app to wallet connect to wallet  then back again to sign is not entirely crypto’s fault, and I suspect not solvable within conventional OSes…

Blogger at ribbonfarm.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

It’s an artifact of physical constraints of phones and to some extent tablets. Small screen + touch = apps sharing screen is hard + modals suck

By contrast desktop browser wallets seem to work well enough, modulo some race conditions bs between multiple wallets that are probably solvable within OS/browser API models

Why do I think this is not solvable in traditional OS? Basically you need app-to-app decentralized trust model that’s not mediated by the device OS too much and a way for apps to inject composable components into each other’s UIs. Ie one app should be able to expose a negotiated plugin interface in another.

My suspicion is that while this is borderline doable within Linux based OSes it is against commercial interests of Apple and perhaps Android too. Apple famously developed a secretive silo culture where teams don’t talk to each other except through management chain. Seems to have driven iOS design via Conway’s law

The situation is actually surprisingly similar to how there are no good robot OSes. ROS does half the right thing of building a message passing layer on-device as the control plane for the robot, but as a guest process in Linux it can’t actually handle the real-time stuff that’s central to robotics. So it’s messy

I don’t have high hopes for this but maybe someone can target VR/AR headsets with this sort of architecture. The ship may have sailed for phones and tablets.

An entity that builds such an OS would need some good open hardware to work with of course, but also a federated security model that mostly lets app-to-app protocols handle things with richer control than clumsy flow control passing. Basically an on-device ad hoc network of apps with rich message passing.