On April 9th 2019 I said I was making an app for the Steem ecosystem. I was to demo it in a private fashion at the DTube Forum held in Barcelona in May, but that couldn't happen, as it wasn't ready to be shown.
Today -and during next days- I am happy to reveal what the app is about and a few more details. Some of them are great and some others are not.
The app I am building is a interface for the @dsound app. It is being programmed using fully native components for the Android mobile operating system. On launch day it will provide listening trending post's audio and upvoting trending and posts from your following steemians. Very simple, but I like the UNIX philosophy or build tools that do few things but in the best way possible.
This app is more of a personal project with no involvement neither from DSound or its creator, @prc. But I do have a rule for its development: don't do anything harmful to DSound. My app will bring more users to DSound, so more possible upvotes, which could bring more Steem for DSound developer to keep it running. My app will do nothing to change that. It will not be possible to create a new post using it; it is just a client for the DSound hosted content.
The app will be free forever with no ads.
Why building it?
I am not a native code yihadist neither a "web technologies are best" kind of person. It is known that I tend to criticize apps built on web technologies. But I do because they bundle web apps as native ones.
DSound works very well, both on the desktop environment and on the mobile one. It maintains a bottom bar with the song -or podcast- you are listening to; that way you can browse more posts on DSound, music keeps playing and you are aware of what are you listening to. You can also upvote it while you are reading some other post or viewing a list of some other author posts.
Music is a usual part of everyone's daily life. Young people are unable to do anything if they are not listening to music -well, that is assuming regueton could be categorized as music xDDDD-.
However, when going to SteemApps, you could see only 185 Monthly Active Users with just 550 STEEM of rewards for DSound. It is considered as Alpha, but it is quite usable.
I do think that a native Android app could help in bringing more users to DSound, both already existing steemians and new ones.
DSound already is usable on a mobile device, but being a native app could bring more users, those still not introduced to the Steem blockchain who could be searching for other similar apps.
Next time, in three days, I will publish a new post about the schedule of releases of the app. Until then, thank you for reading.
Image created on Canva with assets from Pixabay