AppCoins News Update, or ANU for short, is a regular bi-weekly update by the AppCoins team. As usual we are going to cover the latest dev updates, regarding the App Store Foundation website and the released Alpha 2 version of both the ASF Wallet and the ASF SDK, the featured team member, a detailed coverage of the Game Developers Conference, along with how ASF became a member of the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance. You may expect the next ANU on April 11th.

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Dev Update

APPC Markets Report

Featured Team Member

Game Developers Conference

Strategic Alliances

On the 21st of March, we released the Alpha 2 version of both the ASF Wallet, already published in Google Play and Aptoide, and the ASF SDK. Along with the necessary smart contract that implements the revenue split of an in-app purchase, this release allowed users and developers to have a first look on how in-app purchases using APPC are possible and simple.

As said in ANU #5, for the next 4 weeks we’ll be working on the Alpha 3 version of both the ASF Wallet and the ASF SDK, along with the protocol itself. The Alpha 3 will include the first version of the Advertising use case of the AppCoins protocol, which allows developers to create campaigns and reward users for using their apps.

Alpha 3

AppCoins protocol — Advertising flow

The Advertising flow of the AppCoins protocol assumes the creation of campaigns by advertisers (developers) and the gathering of active campaigns by the app stores to be shown to users matching the campaigns filters. We’ll provide tools for both processes. For the sake of demonstration, when releasing the Alpha 3, we’ll provide an offer wall with some active campaigns to showcase the functionalities of the implementation.

Campaign creation

We’ll provide an interface in the ASF Website that can be used to create campaigns. Advertisers (developers) will be able to introduce the necessary data produce a valid campaign, such as the campaign filters (package name, package vercode, localisation).

Once all the necessary data is introduced by the developer, the campaign will be sent to a smart contract that will store it and also fire an event.

Offer Wall

We’ll develop an offer wall that will exemplify how to get active campaigns from the blockchain and show them to users. This should later be done by app stores that integrate the AppCoins protocol since they are the parties distributing the apps.

ASF SDK

The SDK will contain logic that will be responsible for triggering the computation of the Proof-of-Attention (PoA) by the wallet when the app is launched for the first time. Since the protocol defines that for an attribution to take place, the user has to give at least 2 minutes of attention to the app, the SDK will trigger the ASF Wallet (or any other AppCoins-compliant wallet) with the necessary data 12 times with intervals of 10 seconds.

ASF Wallet

The wallet is responsible for getting the 12 PoA components sent by the SDK and for computing the complete PoA once it gets all the components. Each component is composed of the fields:

poa_component = {"ts": 1521907200,

"package_name": "com.whatsapp",

"nonce": "9oi81n6nhzx5"}

The PoA is of the form:

{

"campaign_id": "dfgbhnjkm", # defined when creating the campaign

"poa_id": "uygfcvjhg", # hash of all the fields

"wallet": "com.asfoundation.wallet",

"package_name": "com.whatsapp",

"components": [{"ts": 1521907200, "nonce": "9oi81n6nhzx5"},

{"ts": 1521907210, "nonce": "9oi81n6nhzx5"},

{"ts": 1521907220, "nonce": "9oi81n6nhzx5"},

{"ts": 1521907230, "nonce": "9oi81n6nhzx5"},

{"ts": 1521907240, "nonce": "9oi81n6nhzx5"},

{"ts": 1521907250, "nonce": "9oi81n6nhzx5"},

{"ts": 1521907260, "nonce": "9oi81n6nhzx5"},

{"ts": 1521907270, "nonce": "9oi81n6nhzx5"},

{"ts": 1521907280, "nonce": "9oi81n6nhzx5"},

{"ts": 1521907290, "nonce": "9oi81n6nhzx5"},

{"ts": 1521907300, "nonce": "9oi81n6nhzx5"},

{"ts": 1521907310, "nonce": "9oi81n6nhzx5"}]

}

Once the PoA is computed, the wallet sends it to the smart contract in order to have it stored in the blockchain in the form of an event. It can later be validated / invalidated by the developer and the automatic revenue split between the user (85%), the app store (10%) and the OEM (5%) takes place.

The transaction screen of the wallet will also be revamped in order to make it clearer the type of each transaction. At the moment we have transactions of sending and receiving tokens, and we also already have transactions that consist of calling smart contract methods. In addition, by the end of the next 4 weeks, we’ll also have transactions that consist of writing PoAs to the blockchain. Therefore, it’s important that a user can immediately identify the context of each transaction.

ASF Website

We’ll also be including information in the ASF website about how to become a member of the ASF and take part on the working groups that will help us accomplish our goal of disrupting the app economy and dynamics. Once the information is there, we’ll let you know and we encourage you to take part in this revolution.