Hi, everyone! This is Lyriaaw from the Core Team.
In this session, I’m going to present the
updates and the future plans of the Pi Apps Platform.
In the second quarter of 2020, we
introduced the Pi Apps platform prototype
with its first third-party app, FeverIQ.
We had multiple iterations of the prototypes to
fix bugs, improve scalability and user experience,
and finally we announced the developer SDK
and the testing Sandbox at the end of May.
The Pi SDK allows developers
to develop their applications
in whichever programming language
they prefer in their backend
and integrate with the Pi Platform
interface with Javascript in the frontend.
For developers to integrate with Pi, we
adopted industry standard technologies,
such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript, so that
they can focus more on building applications
rather than getting complex technologies to work.
Pi 3rd-party apps will initially
be hitting Pi’s backend,
so that they can iterate on their app designs
and establish their use cases and audiences.
Once they are ready and the blockchain becomes
live, their backend will be able to adapt to hit
the Pi Testnet or Mainnet directly, eventually
achieving decentralization. This makes sure that
the development of utility and decentralization
are in parallel, rather than in sequence.
In Q3, we hoped that developers would be able
to play with the released SDK and Sandbox
and explore what could be built on
Pi. We will see a few examples later
in the developers’ demos after the Core Team talk.
The next step for the Pi Platform is to increase
its functionalities for third party developers
to develop fully functional apps with the
ability to provide better user experience,
while improving scalability and the
security of the overall Pi system,
in relation to the Pi Platform and
the protection of user privacy.
First, we would like to provide SDK endpoints
for developers to take advantage of the
scalable database backend of Pi Network.
We will build a user-state object in our SDK
for third-party apps to provide continued users
experience, for instance the ability for users to
continue what they left off from previous visits.
This is indeed important for almost all apps.
Providing this endpoint means that
developers will be able to store data
for each of their users directly onto the Pi
backend, without needing to setup their own
servers or store the data in the frontend.
While more complex apps will still require
their own backend, this SDK functionality
will enable a plethora of simple apps
to work without worrying about the servers.
Second, the platform will be able to allow
authentication into using third-party
apps without sharing their Pi username.
In the current version of the platform,
the access and use of third party apps rely on the
user’s willingness to share their Pi usernames.
Even though the choice to share or not
is completely in the hands of the user,
not sharing the Pi username would mean
inability to use the specific third-party app.
The next versions of the platform
would like to make the authentication
to use third-party apps more flexible to
provide better control and protection of
users privacy while maintaining their
ability to use third-party apps.
Eventually, the platform will enable third
party apps to request specific information
about the user, and allow the user
to accept or refuse each of them.
The platform wants to provide more functionalities
and accessibility for third-party apps
to tap into the infrastructure of
the Pi system and Pi community.
For example, the ability for third-party
apps to create their own Pi chat rooms
through the SDK to interact with their users.
We will allow developers to generate
custom links that would take users directly
to the developer’s intended place inside of the
third party app, a process called “deep linking”.
This way, they will be able to invite
new users into their apps directly
without having to go through the
general workflow of the Pi App first.
It will also enable experiences where one
user can interact with another one seamlessly.
For instance, in a round-based
game, a user gets a link that
navigates them directly to interface of
the game where they need to make a move;
or a marketplace, a user can go
directly check one specific item.
Finally, the platform will also gradually
release more functionalities to the developers
to integrate with the Pi currency.
In the current version, developers
can request payments from Pioneers. Later versions
will provide ability for the developers to pay the
Pioneers, completing the loop of bidirectional
payments between app developers and Pioneers.
As we discussed in the Pi Phase 2
strategy announcement in March 2020,
we will first focus on enabling
third-party apps inside the Pi app itself,
before enabling a Pi Payments
for completely external apps.
Technically, this means that
the availability of specific
API endpoints will tailor to the needs of
in-app third-party apps based on reasons,
such as efficiency and security, rather
than enabling external applications to be
able to run Pi Payments, which will
come further down the line though.
Thus, the API endpoints that we will make
available next will be able to validate
payments to the app developer and to provide
privacy control between a Pioneer and an app.
Thanks for watching!
