Introducing the Textile SDK for iOS

Native mobile access to the decentralized web for super-charging your mobile dApps

Photo by Fabian Grohs on Unsplash

Any good cross-platform SDK needs a good iOS library, or two! Today, we are happy to announce the release of the Textile SDK for iOS, enabling anyone who’s developing mobile apps in Swift or Objective-C to easily incorporate Textile and all the goodies it contains.

What can you do with the new SDK?

While we’ve previously released our JavaScript and React Native SDKs, we’ve had a lot of people asking for the native-only API. With this new release, your browser, desktop, or even smart contract based app can have an iOS app too. Your app can use the libp2p, IPFS, and Textile stack (it’s LIT!) to help you deliver unstoppable applications:

Use Textile threads to deploy and synchronize a decentralized database in your mobile app, use IPFS to store and transfer any type of data, leverage end-to-end encrypted communication via libp2p, and offer your users new ways to access and control the data your app creates.

Here’s a look at what the iOS SDK could mean for your app.

Connect anyone, anywhere

Threads provide flexible data sharing and synchronization for mobile and desktop applications. Your app can create private, encrypted spaces for your users to share photos, host a conversation, or exchange private documents. They extend the core IPFS stack to help you build applications that can connect anyone, anywhere in the world.

Build resilient applications

The IPFS network provides a backbone to run applications that are resistant to tampering, censoring, or throttling. You can now tap into those benefits through the Textile SDK for iOS. Textile configures a local IPFS peer to work well for the mobile constraints of connectivity, frequent life-cycles, and battery needs.

Any platform, the same decentralized interface

The native iOS library is joining a growing family of Textile tools to support cross-platform applications; React Native, JavaScript, and Go support is already available, and the beta release of Android is right behind them. We want it to be easy and consistent no matter how you want to get your app to your users, so we’re focused on making these libraries complimentary and unified. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy using them!

Getting started

We’ve added Swift and Objective-C examples to our Tour of Textile, so that’s a great place to start. Additionally, the iOS portion of our docs gives a good overview of some of the basic APIs to help get you started.

Let’s look at a Swift example

Let’s subscribe to real-time updates of a thread, the decentralized databases that power Textile.

Simple as that. Next, let’s encrypt a file, add it to IPFS and share it back to our thread.

Interested? Come join our developer Slack channel if you want to learn from and share with the community!

Finally, if you are going to be in San Jose for AltConf, come meet us there! We’ll be giving a talk about running IPFS on mobile devices. We’d love to meet you.