Plug Mobile– Plug Mobile Authentication Android Alpha
Plug into the Internet Computer, while you’re on the go! 🤖
Today, we’re beyond excited to be extending the accessibility of dApps in our ecosystem by bringing you an IC first — Plug Mobile authentication, powered by Wallet Connect.
With this initial release, we’re focusing on getting dApps integrating Plug as a login & transaction signing option to extend their coverage to mobile, battle-test it, and provide us with valuable feedback. Hence, the alpha title.
This release comes with three things:
- An updated Android application for developer testing 👾
- A new Plug in-page provider for talking with mobile 📡
- An update to the Plug Connect button 🔌
Users worry not, your time will come! This is a necessary step to ensure that Plug Mobile Authentication is a well-oiled machine by the time it drops into your hands. Expect both an iOS release for developer testing & then a full user-focused release shortly.
We’re keeping this blog short & sweet, here’s a quick syllabus:
The How: Plug Mobile Auth Architecture
If you’re familiar with desktop extension wallets, you’ll know that in order to communicate with an application the extension injects an object called an in-page provider into the webpage that has an available API for talking with the extension. This is how Plug works on desktop.
However, what do you do when there is no extension to inject this in-page provider? Well, you either leave it up to the integrations to add in themselves, or you leverage a common access point. We’re taking the latter approach.
In our case, this common access point is the Plug Connect button that most dApps use to easily authenticate users and instantiate a usable agent to sign messages with. The button now has its own copy of an updated in-page provider & is able to filter the usage of this mobile-friendly in-page provider to when a user is on mobile & has Plug downloaded.
With all of this in place, we simply needed a messaging layer to pass requests from a browser page to the Plug Mobile application. We’ve chosen to use Wallet Connect.
Integration & Feedback
⚠️ This is an alpha release and should not be treated as stable ⚠️
We’ve put together a guide in our documentation that goes over exactly what is required. Hint: It’s surprisingly easy.
Once you’ve checked out our documentation & given the integration a go, we ask that you please visit our Discord and provide us with feedback. It’s a valuable resource for us to make the best possible mobile auth experience for both developers and your dApp’s users.
Plug Mobile Authentication + IC = Countless Possibilities
This has been a long, complicated journey for our team. Providing a full (desktop & mobile) auth experience to our users has been our number one goal this quarter. We are thrilled to bring you the first iteration of it just as the quarter winds down 🚀
Mobile authentication opens a world of possibilities in the IC ecosystem!
Let’s use our favorite DEX, Sonic.ooo, as an example. Previously, users could only swap tokens with their Plug Wallet browser extension. Not only does this limit when you can access the dApp, but also who can access the dApp.
What’s Next?
You ain’t seen nothing yet. This is just the start of releases that we have planned for Plug’s Q4.
Want the alpha? We spilled some beans on Twitter recently, you should check it out 😉
Have a feature that you want to be added, but don't see in our plans? Hop into our Discord server and let the team know. We pride ourselves on being able to ship community demanded features, and often!
See you all in the next ecosystem-changing update 👋
