Сommon issues with DApps — and how they can be fixed

The concept of decentralized applications has been recently kicked around a lot by startups, blockchain enthusiasts and the crypto community in general. Yet when one decides to check whichever DApp listing in order to learn about the current state of things, the actual user involvement in the projects turns out to be vanishingly small: in fact, even the top five projects in any field, be it games or exchanges, roughly have more than 1k users. By the way, could you even name a successful DApp you’re familiar with, apart from CryptoKitties?

So why all the noise? Well of course, one could speculate that DApps are finding themselves at the same life stage the Internet was thirty or so years ago, but let’s cut that empty talk — and instead try to find out what roadblocks (in regard to both users and developers) are standing on the way of DApps at this point in time.

The development of DApps is not an easy task

The obvious stumbling point in the development of a DApp: given the fact that there are not that many underlying instruments for building your own decentralized application out there, almost everything has to be made from scratch, which makes for a pretty tough development process, to say the least. Is there even a need to discuss this in detail when the very first difficulty you encounter is choosing between the existing programming languages — all them Solidities, Simplicities, Vypers?

The good thing is, this problem is temporary — those who now struggle with the construction of their DApps in conditions of insufficient tools might be perceived as pioneers who will lay the groundwork for further generations of developers. And of course, one should also not forget that we’ll have WebAssembly in the near future.

“One more time and I’ll go snap”, she said

Another major problem with DApps lay in the scalability of many blockchains, most notably — the Ethereum network : as for now, it can only perform ten to thirty transactions per second, which is obviously too slow, especially taking into consideration that the amount of pending transactions will continue to grow along with the network load. The case of CryptoKitties bringing down the whole network still remains fresh in everyone’s memory.

This obstacle, however, can be easily bypassed. Instead of building projects on main blockchains (like Ethereum) developers could as well resort to much faster sidechains like Lightning, Raiden or Loom Network. In fact, this migration is already happening and has proven to be sufficient so far.

Ignorance is bliss

Alright, both aforementioned problems relate to the objective conditions in which DApps are now evolving. But these difficulties only constitute the tip of the iceberg — it’s bottom is actually the people: developers who are often not exactly sure about what they want to achieve in the first place (or whose only motivation is to make quick money and disappear straight after) and users. The former group is not really worth talking about; let us just examine the existing issues with users — as well as the issues users have with DApps — and solutions to them:

a) Users often don’t know whom to trust and whom to avoid; can’t navigate through hundreds of DApps already in existence. The solution is obviously DApp listings and crypto media who should point out which project is worthy — and which one is a scam. Another useful option that would help users tell between right and wrong is the community audit — Smartz.io are already working on this feature.

b) Users often find interaction with DApps difficult. The probable reasons for that are the complexity of the interface of a certain DApp and the lack of expertise on user’s side. The first problem will probably solve itself with time — the developers are obviously getting better in this field (those who don’t, will soon learn what natural selection is); the users will evolve alongside.

c) Finally, there is also the aforementioned general lack of user involvement — who’s to blame for that one? Media? Nah, they seem to do their job well, hence all the hype around DApps. Developers? Well, kind of.

Let’s not confuse user interest with user involvement: there is plenty of interest, it’s developers who underperform or aren’t mature enough, at least for now. This is the exact reason why so many people have heard about DApps, but (on a large scale) can’t name anything other than Cryptokitties — it’s just that there are not many projects worth mentioning.