GeoCryptoCurrency

Why we went native.

What makes working at DOVU interesting is that we’re at the cutting edge of many new technologies and always have ‘problems worth solving’ to keep us out of trouble. You know … money in the post-truth era, trying to stop the human race from destroying itself … that kind of thing.

While we can have hours of stimulating discussion on these topics, we’re well aware that our job is to turn ideas into tangible stuff, like decisions and lines of code. One of the decisions we made in the run-up to our Beta launch was to ditch the React Native platform. This was not an easy call to make, since we’d invested hundreds of hours into development, and it also meant launching with a reduced feature set.

Back in the Autumn, we moved to the true native languages of the Android and iOS platforms — Swift and Java respectively — and we haven’t looked back.

This piece isn’t going to be a rant about the difficulties of working with React Native. You can ask Airbnb about that. They came to the same conclusions as we did (after spending a lot more time and money).

No, this is about how excited we are to be moving forward with the right foundation in place. The thing is, it wasn’t just that React Native didn’t live up to its ‘code once, deploy twice’ promise. It turned out that the really exciting stuff we want to do in the future would just not be possible with React Native in between us and the device APIs. Or maybe it would have been possible, but it wouldn’t be sensible, secure or fun to work like that.

We’re not just trying to duplicate a website on a mobile device. The mobile device for us is an essential part of the smart travel platform that we’re building, and it has many features we want to access: accelerometers, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, biometrics, hardware encryption, to name the main ones.

Direct access to all of these is essential for adding more decentralized mechanisms like zero-knowledge proof of location and proof of identity and for paving the way for the efficient transmission of large multisensor datasets over 5G, when it arrives. All this will allow us to create a real-time market for transport resources and the data they generate.

It also means we can explore ways to hide some of the scary-for-the-mainstream-user elements of cryptocurrency, which we believe is essential for the mass adoption of the technology.

We are at the ‘command line’ phase of cryptocurrency where you, dear reader, are the only one nerdy enough to be able to understand it. If you want your mates (and your auntie!) to get on board, we are going to need the equivalent of drag-and-drop.

We think that this is going to be some mashup of the biometrics and cryptographic features of mobiles to enable non-technical users to use public/private key encryption safely, without even realising that’s what they’re doing.

As you will see over the coming months, we have laid the groundwork for a whole series of earning mechanisms, allowing you to earn more and more value for being part of our smart travel solution, as well as for ‘frictionless e-commerce’ in our marketplace and (soon to be released) partner reward modules.

If you haven’t already, click here to help us test our Beta Wallet.