Feature Story: How Blockchain Technology is helping app developers

31st August 2018- Hey everyone, welcome to a series where we share our passion and knowledge through a feature story that is aimed at helping either app developers, app users or data buyers to leverage and understand more about how Blockchain Technology can improve businesses and personal lives.

With first hand experience of creating multiple apps, the team from SWIPE knows how hard and difficult it is to create a successful application that is both useful and profitable. It is highly competitive and marketing cost is skyhigh. If you are an app developer and found this article useful, do join our community and engage with us!

The apps market has seen an explosive growth over the last couple of years. For instance, as of the first quarter of 2018, there were 3.8 million apps in the google play store, whereas iPhone users could choose from 2 million apps. These numbers show that the app developing market is a very competitive space. Not only is it difficult to develop an app that stands out amongst the millions of different apps that are out there, but it is also difficult to generate a steady revenue.

Less than 2% of the users are willing to spend money on in-app purchases and even fewer are willing to download paid apps. Most apps are resorting to displaying ads as a steady stream of revenue, but ads are annoying to the user and disruptive to the user experience, often leading to reduced retention rates. With all these challenges that need to be overcome, many apps have been relying on data monetization to keep their head above the water.

How can Blockchain Technology help app developers?

With the rise of blockchain technology, new opportunities to incentivize and engage users have emerged. By leveraging the power of blockchain technology, it now becomes possible for developers to find creative ways to engage users by rewarding them for performing certain in-game actions (e.g. being incentivized for defeating an end-boss).

Several blockchain projects are specifically aimed at leveraging blockchain technology to facilitate app/game development and make life for app developers a little easier. In the following section I want to highlight three blockchain projects that help app developers to build their product with minimum effort and provide more upside potential than launching a traditional app in the app store. These three projects are: Loom Network, Enjin Coin and SWIPE. I would like to emphasise more about SWIPE, as it does not only help app developers create a sustainable business, it also helps app developers to be compensated for monetizing their data.

Loom Network

Loom Network is a next-generation blockchain platform that facilitates developers to run large-scale applications on the Ethereum network. Loom Network is mostly focused around game development. Thanks to their SDK, developers can build their own blockchain without a broad understanding of its underlying blockchain technology. This benefits developers tremendously, as they do not need to worry about implementing blockchain or focus on the technical side of blockchain themselves, but only need to focus on coding the core application logic. This means that developers can build their application within weeks rather than months or even years, hence the time and budget needed to develop a decentralized application (dApp) can be largely reduced using the Loom Network platform.

To facilitate the use of Loom Network, the developers have created CryptoZombies, which is a free code school where developers can learn to build games and other dApps, based on the Ethereum blockchain.

Enjin Coin

Enjin Coin is a blockchain project that offers a completely flexible, free platform for creating, integrating and scaling tokenized gaming assets. For instance, with Enjin Coin’s integrated blockchain technology, developers can add the following benefits to their games:

True item ownership: meaning that a user is truly the owner of an in-game item and can use it in other games, or sell it for other cryptocurrencies or fiat money. True item ownership is an extremely valuable proposition for gamers, denoting that they will be more likely to purchase in-game items; hence increasing the developer’s revenue stream.

Gaming multiverses: With Enjin Coin technology it becomes possible for gamers to use their characters and items across multiple interlinked games. Developers could benefit from increased loyalty across all the games that are connected with each other. Also, new games that are compatible with previous games may benefit from a pre-existing user-base that is eager to try out their existing character/items in a new game.

These are just two of the features Enjin coin utilizes to help developers increase revenue and user engagement.

How can SWIPE help app developers?

As mentioned earlier, an added benefit for launching an app with the help of blockchain technology is the fact that developers and their users can be rewarded with cryptocurrency tokens. SWIPE is aiming to help app developers with being fairly compensated for monetizing their data.

SWIPE offers an array of marketing tools and a Software Development Kit (SDK) that allows for the app data to be collected. Developers need to enable the data collection and they can start the monetization process.

One of the features SWIPE is creating is a decentralized data marketplace on top of Origin Protocol. Each time data is purchased, the app developers will receive a fair compensation; unlike the old traditional model where data is sold to a third party for a one-time fee. Because of the lack of transparency, the buyer can then resell the data to as many buyers as he likes, diluting app developer’s revenue in the process. However, with SWIPE, app developers will be rewarded each time data is purchased, and the app developers will not be short-changed as compared with the old traditional model.

Another benefit for app developers that implement SWIPE into their application is that their app users are better protected in terms of privacy and they have the ability to control who gets access to their data, all managed through a smart contract. Users have the ability to opt in and out of data monetizing campaigns. If users decide to share their data they will get rewarded accordingly in SWIPE tokens. The main focus of this feature is that users are in control of their data and they always get to decide if and with whom they want to share it.