Beacon SDK v2 — Deeplinking & improved user onboarding

The next version of the Beacon SDK brings may improvements and features, notably support for deeplinking and more usable onboarding flow.

Published in

AirGap

4 min readDec 8, 2020

With great effort, support and feedback from various teams in the ecosystem, the Beacon SDK v2 is now available for developers.

Besides the main features of an improved user onboarding flow and support for deeplinking, additional improvements were made with Beacon SDK v2. A full list of changes can be found in the changelog.

Improved user onboarding

With the improved user onboarding dialog, it is now possible to have multiple browser extensions like Thanos and Beacon Extension installed and active at the same time. The desired extension can now be selected by the user and the dApp will send all the requests to that Extension.

Besides selecting an extension the dialog now also offers pairing with web or desktops wallets like Kukai. The requests are sent from the dApp to Kukai’s web wallet where they can be confirmed by the user.

For mobile wallets like AirGap Wallet, you can simply scan the QR code to setup a connection with the dApp.

Deeplinking

The addition of deeplinking does not only bring support for web and desktop wallets, it also allows the use of Beacon v2 with compatible mobile wallets. Bringing the interaction with dApps directly to the mobile device.

Beacon v2 dialog on Android (left) and on iOS (right)

The dialog varies depending on the mobile operating system you’re using.

A mobile wallet like AirGap Wallet that is installed on the same device can be paired to the dApp opened in the browser on a smartphone. Requests of the dApp will then pop-up inside the wallet mobile app.

Additionally, web wallets like Kukai are also supported directly on mobile.

Further improvements

Secure and encrypted communication between dApp and Browser Extension
Acknowledge Message: The Wallet will now send an acknowledge message immediately after a request is received.
Disconnect Message: There is now a disconnect event that can be sent from both sides and indicates that the connection will no longer be listened to

More changes can be found in the detailed changelog.

Which wallets are currently compatible with Beacon v2?

AirGap, Beacon Extension, Kukai and Thanos are currently Beacon v2 compatible with others in the works, take a look at the Beacon Website for an updated list.

Which dApps are currently compatible with Beacon v2?

We were in touch with various dApp teams in the ecosystem as end users won’t see these changes until dApps have updated to v2.

dApps like Dexter or Tezos Domains are currently working on their upgrade to v2 and will make it available soon.

dApp developers

The APIs on the dApp and Wallet side stayed mostly the same. There may be some minor changes in the object structure, but the majority of the changes are internal and should not affect developers.

It is recommended to update dApps that were previously using the Beacon SDK v1 to add support for the new features introduced in v2 like deeplinking. More information can be found in the Beacon SDK documentation.

Taquito
For developers that are using the Taquito library and the BeaconWallet API upgrade to latest version to get access to the v2 features.

Contributors

Many thanks to the tzip-10 wallet working group, that provided valuable feedback and coordination.

- Andreas Gassmann Beacon/AirGap
- Claude Barde Taquito - dApps/ECAD Labs
- Inna Stetsiak Taquito/ECAD Labs
- Jev Björsell Taquito/ECAD Labs
- Klas Harrysson Kukai/Tezos Commons
- Korney Vasilchenko Thanos/Madfish Solutions
- Luis Gonzalez Kukai/Tezos Commons
- Pascal Brun Beacon/AirGap
- Roxane Létourneau Taquito - Wallet API/ECAD Labs
- Serhii Pashchenko Thanos/Madfish Solutions

And everyone else who has provided feedback!