There is a Holochain app on mobile phones.
Shipping this fall, Volla Phone’s new Quintus model will have two Holochain apps preloaded on it. One of these is Relay. On its face, Relay is a simple chat app. But its impact is much deeper than that. Like Signal, Relay is fully encrypted. But unlike the industry standard for secure communication, Relay doesn’t use central servers, adding an additional layer of security and privacy. Relay also doesn’t need your phone number as it addresses its messages directly to your public key which acts as a decentralized digital identifier. Not only does Relay come preinstalled on the Quintus, but it will also be available for Windows, MacOS, Linux, and all Volla devices including the Volla Tablet
But how did we get here? There have been calls for Holochain to be on mobile for awhile, but it took a set of synergistic needs to make it happen. Volla needed an alternative to the big cloud providers. darksoil studio needed a mobile version of Holochain. And the world needs open source tech.
No project, no technical development, springs up from thin air. It’s rather a process of many small steps and connections that come together to realize new possibilities.
To tell the story of Relay, we reached out to the people involved to give a full view into this process.
Volla
It was just over a year ago that community dev Hedayat Abedijoo connected with Dr. Wurzer, bringing Nick Stebbings with him to the Volla Community Days where they demoed Holochain and made the first attempts at developing on mobile. Building on the fantastic early work of Nick and Hedayat, Holochain has been growing ties between Volla and our community since. Here is what Volla founder Dr. Wurzer has to say about their choice to integrate Holochain into their products:
“The big picture of Volla is a secure and independent communication infrastructure. A smartphone is an elementary component. The cloud is another important element. The only way to prevent external influence is distributed, highly encrypted edge computing. As soon as we process or manage user data, access could be forced or our service sanctioned.” —Dr. Wurzer, founder of Volla Phone
Volla’s respect for the privacy of their customers really sets them apart in the smartphone market. Following up on the above, we asked Dr. Wurzer what most excited him about the growing partnership with Holochain.
“The message of Volla is freedom through simplicity and security. Simplicity in the sense of convenience. And this convenience also includes the cloud. That's why Apple is so popular with the iCloud and why Google also has this offering. Together with Holochain, we can now tackle the mass market with high-performance hardware that can compete with an iPhone. If we manage to reach the mass market, we will give back privacy, security and self-determination to many consumers who are overwhelmed by technical issues and trends. We bring the power back to the people. It's not just protected communication, but also free access to information, which — I can only speak for Germany and Europe — is already restricted.” —Dr. Wurzer, founder of Volla Phone
Development
To develop Relay, Holochain brought in Aaron Brodeur and Tibet Sprague of Terran Collective along with our very own Eric Harris-Braun. Here is what they have to say about the development process:
“There was a steep learning curve at the beginning, not only deepening my understanding of Holochain development, but also working with a stack that is pretty new to me: SvelteKit, Tailwind, Skeleton, and of course the P2P Shipyard code that allows it to run on Android using Tauri Mobile. All in all things have gone quite well for such a cutting edge project. The biggest challenge in the Holochain universe is figuring out what bugs are coming from my code and what might be coming from Holochain itself or from the experimental Shipyard code, and keeping up with the many moving pieces. Not to mention also working with a fairly new and evolving platform in Volla Phone and Volla OS.” —Tibet Sprague of Terran Collective
“It's been a huge joy to work with Dr. Wurzer. He's a charming and brilliant entrepreneur with incredible attention to detail, but also a big vision of a phone free from entanglement with the big silicon valley services, allowing people to connect with one another safely and securely. The power of Holochain is obvious to him, and so it was consequently really easy to talk through and work around Holochain's unique affordances — the tradeoffs are worth it!” —Aaron Brodeur of Terran Collective
What was the moment Relay came to life for you?
“The moment we got it running on a Volla Phone for the first time, and Eric and I were successfully able to chat using it was incredible! P2P chat on big tech free phones is such a massively exciting accomplishment and we are going to pull it off.” —Tibet Sprague of Terran Collective
“I was on zoom with Eric Harris-Braun when he first showed me Relay working on the phone. There were many moments early on where we were not 100% sure what we wanted could work on the phone. None of this has ever been tried before! I know on the one hand it's just an app, and at that moment it was just a few lines of text on an empty screen... but I definitely felt like I was witnessing – and contributing to — a historic moment!” —Aaron Brodeur of Terran Collective
What contribution to the Relay app are you most proud of?
“I'm most proud of the brand. I wanted to make something that was adjacent to and compatible with Volla's brand, but distinct. It doesn't often work out like this, but it was the first name and logo I proposed. I love the name because it speaks to how the data is gossiped around within a group – each member of the group is relaying messages on behalf of the other members of the group. The icon is a network diagram in the shape of an R.” —Aaron Brodeur of Terran Collective
p2p Shipyard by darksoil studio
Of course, none of this would have been possible if the hurdles to Holochain working on mobile weren’t solved. The highest applause goes to the team at darksoil studio who did the heavy lifting of building a Holochain plugin for Tauri so that Holochain apps can be deployed to all the platforms Tauri supports: Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android, and soon iOS (on the way). The p2p Shipyard gives developers an easy method for converting their Holochain applications to a diversity of platforms. For the mobile context Holochain is set to its “zero-arc” configuration where mobile nodes don’t have to hold a portion of the DHT like a normal Holochain node would. This saves on battery life and helps the application meet app store requirements. (Volla is using a variation that actually does hold full nodes thanks to their custom designed OS which enables tighter integration with Holochain.)
p2p Shipyard was the key development that made Relay and our work with Volla really successful, but its potential affects the whole ecosystem. So let’s dig a bit deeper into their journey:
Can you tell us about the experience of making Holochain mobile ready?
“It’s been a long road. We have been wanting Holochain on mobile for a long time, and ultimately, we needed it badly enough for ourselves that we went ahead and did it. The p2p Shipyard is our second tool to enable Holochain to work on mobile. Our first one, which used firebase, we knew wouldn’t work long term, but we needed to test our app with users, so we went ahead and did it and ultimately, the learnings from that process contributed to the p2p Shipyard. It’s been a challenging and empowering experience, and it’s not done yet! ” —Eric Bear of darksoil studio
How do you see P2P Shipyard growing in the next year?
“Over the next year we hope to see the p2p Shipyard get put to use! We’re hoping to see a number of Holochain apps ship and function across platforms over this next year, and we’re already working with a few projects in the Holochain ecosystem to help them get their hApps into people’s hands (literally). ” —Eric Bear of darksoil studio
Get Involved
To be one of the first people using Relay, you can support Volla through their Kickstarter campaign where they are fundraising for their initial production run of the Quintus. They hit their funding goal in the first 3 hours, but thankfully you can still get a phone from them.
We don’t know when Relay will be more widely available in app stores, but we expect that to be in the works.
And as for p2p Shipyard, they have a wonderfully innovative funding model which we hope to see more of as it models open source ethics and sustainable business practices all in one.
Support p2p Shipyard
darksoil wants open source development to be more sustainable, so with the p2p Shipyard, they’re using an experimental funding model called retroactive crowdfunding.
Basically, they went and built the software, and then are funding after the fact. Once their retroactive crowdfunding goal of $100k is met, the p2p Shipyard will be free and open source forever.
Currently, the p2p Shipyard is source-available, so the code is publicly visible to audit, but a license is needed to use it.
During the source-available phase, anyone interested in using the p2p Shipyard can reach out to them for a license; and all license fees will go towards the retroactive crowdfunding goal.
Once they meet the goal, and the p2p Shipyard is open source, they will continue to offer support services to maintain, improve, and adapt the p2p Shipyard to meet more people’s needs.
darksoil welcomes anyone invested in the Holochain ecosystem to support this infrastructure with a donation.
