AppCoins News Update, or ANU for short, is a regular bi-weekly update by the AppCoins team. As usual, we are going to cover dev updates, market reports, team members and upcoming events. This week’s focus is on the recent developments regarding the AppCoins BDS Wallet, the remaking proposal of the User Acquisition flow, and the ASF Blockchain Summit which will take place on November 5th in Lisbon.

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Two weeks have passed, and it’s time for another Dev Update!

These last two weeks have been spent completing tasks we’ve been delaying due to the Ritchie release. These included a few website pages and the final proposal for the remaking of the User Acquisition, which is the flow that enables users to get rewards for using apps. It also included some developments in the AppCoins BDS Wallet that had to be completed.

Regarding the website pages, we’ve finished the App Store Foundation (ASF) Blockchain Summit website.

The ASF Summit has the purpose “to serve the global community of app developers, app stores, OEMs and ecosystem-builders to connect, learn and share knowledge with one another.”

The website might still go through a few changes regarding speakers and agenda, but it’s already out there for people to know more about what the Summit intends to achieve.

Regarding the website pages, we’ve created a page where users, developers, and enthusiasts can check the APPC purchases we make to account for the payments that are done with fiat currency via credit cards. This feature was released in the Ritchie Release, and along with it, we wanted to have a page where we would showcase each APPC purchase that was made. For each payment done with credit card, we buy the corresponding amount of APPC in real-time, in exchanges. For example, given an app that integrates the Blockchain Distribution Services (BDS) Billing System, if a user buys an item inside that app that is marked to cost 10 APPC and pays using credit card, we will buy those 10 APPC from exchanges, and distribute them through the developer (85%), the app store (10%) and the OEM (5%), as described in the AppCoins Protocol whitepaper.

Taking into consideration the developments we’ve been doing in the AppCoins BDS Wallet, we’ve been working mainly on two things. The first was reducing its size since the app had almost 50 MB. We felt this was too much for an Ethereum wallet, and therefore have taken out some dependencies the app had. The app has now 14.5 MB and this update has been published both in Google Play and Aptoide.

In addition, we’ve been working to have the ASF IAP flow functioning with the AppCoins BDS Wallet. After the Ritchie release, the IAP flow from ASF stopped working with the AppCoins BDS Wallet because the wallet became too coupled with the BDS Billing System. Since the IAP flow from ASF doesn’t rely on any third parties and APIs, apart from the Ethereum Blockchain itself, the flow only worked with the ASF Wallet. We wanted to have the AppCoins BDS Wallet fully compatible with ASF, thus we’ve been working on that goal. The developments are almost finished and will be published in the next couple of weeks.

Lastly, we’ve finalized the proposal for the remaking of the User Acquisition flow. This is one of the two major flows of the AppCoins Protocol, and it’s the one that enables users to get rewards for using apps. Developers are able to create user acquisition campaigns for their apps, and the protocol rewards users when the proof that they actually used the apps — what we call the Proof-of-Attention (PoA) — is submitted to the protocol. As of now, the flow has a major friction point: users need to have ETH to submit the PoA and get the APPC reward. This made that almost every user had a hard time getting rewarded, which defeated the purpose of the flow.

In addition, we’ve always talked about the concept of creating a circular economy, where users would use at least a part of the rewards they earn in in-app purchases, thus creating a more dynamic and interesting mobile ecosystem.

Therefore, we are proposing an extension to the AppCoins Protocol. One that will be built on top of the already existing User Acquisition flow, and that will remove these friction points and add more value to users and developers. In fact, this will be the major development that we’ll publish in the next big release. Stay tuned for more updates on this!