In our very first blog post we introduced Ethereum Android — a mobile platform aimed at Android developers and businesses to enrich their applications with Blockchain technology.

A quick recap: as powerful as Blockchain technology is, it is still quite complex to grasp and the paradigm shift from centralization to decentralization makes it even more complex to write software that makes use of Blockchain technology. Our platform’s purpose is it to alleviate some of this complexity and make sure that everything Blockchain related — e.g. authentication, creation and interaction of smart contracts — is done in a highly secure but still frictionless manner. An Android developer just has to include our library to make his app securely interact with every Ethereum based Blockchain.

Now we’d like to show you a project that uses our platform for its mobile client app.

PassLfix — Peer-to-peer package delivery

PassLfix combines smart contracts and IoT sensors to create an ‘Internet of Objects’. To be more specific, it uses the fact that most people have a smartphone and that a significant part of them travel regularly to create a decentralized delivery service. Some peer-to-peer delivery services already exist (Roadie, Grabr or PiggyBee), however, there is always the trust factor involved: who will pay if my package gets lost or damaged? Normally, trust has to be established by a big company that assures that you get reimbursed in case something goes wrong. PassLfix aims to create a genuinely decentralized peer-to-peer delivery service backed by Blockchain technology.

They have collaborated with Streamr and us to create a first prototype which consists of a mobile client for Android and a web interface. Streamr already described the web application in their blog post.

We will now give some insights about the mobile application part.

For the prototype we used our sample app as scaffolding:

As you can see, we list every step of the delivery process where a smartphone is involved, from authentication to receiving the package.

The sole focus was to provide the necessary functionality. No effort was done in terms of UI so it just consists of a stack of buttons.

Use case 1 — verifying the package content before sending

In case of an eventual damaging of the package during the delivery process, a picture of the unsealed open package is taken before sending it away.