While a HUGE fan of the new wallet idea I just don't understand the point of an 'App Store' within the wallet which now seems to be the primary focus? Maybe I am looking at it the wrong way but these are my concerns.
1) Why would I want a bunch of apps running within my wallet? Like what would they be? People are making comparison to Google Play...so you guys are thinking people want to download games like Angry Birds or Tetris and other smartphoney type apps like AccuWeather to use within their wallet??? Why? Seems like besides being unnecessary it would bloat the Wallet program and make it run slower and/or open a huge can of security issues.
2) This is your wallet aka your personal bank vault holding all your wealth in Particle. Most people don't even trust pre-compiled binaries of their wallet. Who would want/trust to use a 3rd party app within your wallet? Seems like a hug security issue. Who/How verifies that the apps are safe and not doing something nasty?
Interested in what people think and counter arguments.
The points you made are perfectly valid, but while I really have no interest in playing Angry Birds in my Particle wallet, having an ability to insta-pay for an upgrade making my angry birds angrier is something that would be nice. It is a brave and risky idea, which could go really bad if implemented wrong, but blow away anything else out of water or atleast make way for more public/market based crypto movement, instead of fighting about which fancy hashing algorithm is fanciest in the same circle, which is something most people completely doesn't care.
You say "Most people don't even trust pre-compiled binaries of their wallet.", which, in my humble opinion, is a bit of elitist statement and such thinking, while quite reasonable in the core of crypto community, is blocking the circulation of coins from
expanding rapidly in the less tech-savvy public.
That being said any app that could go in the wallet, should be examined extremelly well (maybe open source being a requirement, i'm not sure if that would work), same should be (and I bet will be) done with wallet API functions.Now, I for one, would like an app which would show my balance in a BTC/USD/EUR according to different exchanges. Simple - yes, useful - sure. Will it make the wallet run slower and use more resources - only with wrong implementation. Even having an app which displays bitcointalk.org for some people would be pretty convenient.
The point is - giving people the tools to work with and we, as a human race, have already displayed throughout the history, what amazing things we can do with them.
Having apps run in the background could also mean just more resources are consumed by ones computer.
Running a typical desktop at 2.3GHz with 8GB ram, i would be very concerned if i noticed bad performance. That is not something that should occur and being in the QA industry, it would not be acceptable. If a dev created a product to launch and said this was a "final" product to submit for the store, it should be reject for the reason of poor performance. As computers grow and the industry becomes more powerful, we are seeing it increasingly harder to have low amounts of memory and CPU speeds. Mean theres rumor that DDR4 is launching this year.....which means if it launches Q2 '14, by Q2 '15 - Q4 '15 retailers will be unloading stock at significant discount to make room for the new industry strandard - People are going to be adding more RAM to their system as we become more reliant on computers.
That means we shouldn't worry about a "bog" from the hardware standpoint - will will all be based on the devs code for how slow it will run.
One other thing to look at for an example is
www.secondlife.com. I have no clue how many of you actually have seen secondlife in its current state, but it launched in 2003. I played it for about 2 hours back in 2006ish....it wasn't my style of game.
When it launched, it was a single island - map example -
http://www.slmaps.com/oldmaps.htm -
This image is of the world map as it stands in 2013 -
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/File:Continents_Map.pngSecondlife was built on the idea of UGC - User generated content. EVERYTHING you see in game was pretty much created by the community of Secondlife(watch the movie on netflix called life 2.0). Secondlife's creators just created the vessel for the community to bring their thoughts to reality. Its quiet genius IMO as from the dev stand point, makes your life easier. You get to focus on the smaller, but yet more important things like security, quality over quantity, and marketing.
Freeing the dev's time from creating apps and having more time to focus on optimizing the wallet itself, and marketing the coin to less techy/non-computer nerds is how this coin will grow. Being able to create a system for mass market that is user friendly, visually appealing(metro style is becoming more popular) is great for all the non techy computer nerds out there.
I think we need a "standard" for the app store, similar to how Play/iOS store functions to get apps on the market. Maybe we can have a section within the app store for "Community Testing" that allows devs to publish apps that lack test support and can get reviewed by the community before actually being pushed out(if something similar, would deff need a popup stating these apps are alpa/beta tests, use at own risk). These alpha/beta apps would first have to be reviewed by someone/open-source or otherwise before being published there to verify no malware code is present.
You only need to supply the vessel for one to be creative, you dont need to be the creative one
