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 ongoing preparations regarding our September release — which will include a technology that facilitates the adoption of the protocol by developers and app stores, and a new version of the SDK — and China Joy, one of the most influential events in the digital entertainment industry.

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We’re already working with the release of the 2nd of September in mind. This release will make the AppCoins Protocol available in the Aptoide store, and all Aptoide users (more than 200 million yearly unique users) will be able to try out and start benefiting from the added value of the protocol.

However, for this, we need to develop a technology that facilitates the adoption of the protocol by the developers and app stores and overcomes the adoption of Blockchain and Cryptocurrency technology by end users. For the latter, end users must be able to use the payment methods they already use and understand. This means they should be able to seamlessly pay for in-app items without the need to go through the hassle of buying cryptocurrencies first. That process should happen under-the-hood, without sacrificing security and privacy. For the former, we need to make the AppCoins Protocol use cases — In-App Purchases (IAP) and User Acquisition campaigns — as easy to include in developers apps as possible.

Starting with IAP, today Android app developers are used to integrate Google Play’s solution, that consists of items and purchases to be server-side managed. In some cases, developers don’t even need to have their own backend servers and can rely solely on Google Play’s system. Therefore, we’ve decided that we would be developing a system that mimics this pattern developers already know from their perspective, with all the Blockchain part happening under-the-hood.

Our next SDK version will already include the integration with server-side item and purchases management. Developers will be able to register their items in a developers portal and then the SDK will take care of managing the purchases of the users. For developers already using Google Play’s solution, they will only need to change some class names and everything should work as they’re used to.

The next version of the AppCoins Wallet will already include the possibility to pay with credit card. For credit card payments (i.e. off-chain payments), we’ll develop a system that consists of the notarization of payments in the Blockchain. For each wallet (developer, app store, OEM), we’ll periodically compute the Merkle tree of the transactions the wallet sent and received, and send its root hash to the Blockchain for registration and posterior validation by the owners of the wallets. We’ll also provide an API with the transactions in order to enable the validation of the Merkle tree root hash that’s registered in the Blockchain. In the following release, we’ll include µRaiden payment channel technology to go a step further and make transactions even faster.

These developments will greatly decrease the entry and adoption barriers for developers, app stores, and end users, and it will prepare the AppCoins Protocol for mass adoption!