hocwyn

If this were really a huge part of most people's experience of Urbit (that they want to search apps by name rather than by developer) then it would be important to know. My company would be happy to curate a list of All The Apps, if someone convinced me this was the case. Browsing big tech App Stores is a huge pain and most people just follow a link from the developer's web page in practice, but since there are so many fewer Urbit apps browsing a complete list could potentially be high-impact.

My worry would be that "and I wasn't able to find the name of anyone who develops apps!" is complaint #10 on a list of complaints where ##1-9 mean these kinds of people are never going to use Urbit much anyway. In which case we'd have to put a certain amount of work into vetting all these apps and their updates and real users would still find apps the same way - clicking on links to apps their friends are recommending.

I think you're turning the question around the wrong way - there are hundreds of thousands of apps and services on the internet that all force you to make an account with their service to use their software, access data you've uploaded to their service, and interact with other users. That's the thing that is a huge hassle and also, increasingly (with web3 and on-chain applications growing in popularity) a huge security problem because of the attack surfaces those services' front ends offer. On Urbit none of this is necessary, because the "account" (i.e. network identity and keys) of your ship is already baked into all your interactions with the network.

As far as the apps having access to cryptographic secrets you store elsewhere on your Urbit ship: the apps are all installed and running on your ship, so just like other software running on a computer you control they can have access to other local data if you intentionally give them permissions, or they can have no access, or they can have access conditional on some additional safeguard. It depends how you write the app. But an app always knows the Urbit identity of the ship it is installed and running on, and that is baked into messages the app sends to other ships.

You also have the ability to spin up 4 billion virtual identities ("moons") per primary identity ("planet"), and it is a standard use case to run an app/service you don't want to interact with the rest of your ship on one of your moons. The main value currently is, if you host a high-traffic groups or distribute a popular app, these would make your primary ship run slow so you stick them on a moon. But the reason Urbit was designed to associate each identity with 4B virtual identities was so that your IoT devices can communicate with the network without having access to your personal computer.

Not really? You could have thousands, hell millions of people who love your twitter account or your podcast but if a critical mass (not even a majority! just a large and sufficiently noisy minority) complain about you, you're gone.

On Urbit there are 65k tracker nodes and ~4B permanent peer nodes. So long as a single 1 out of those 65k is willing to sponsor you and broadcast your location anyone can find you and get packets from you, and even if the last 1 gets sick of you he's still just the equivalent of a torrent tracker: anyone who is already your peer will continue to see you on the network. It doesn't matter how many enemies you have or which corporations you piss off, you know? You're your own platform, once you install the software to share tweets or photos or interviews or whatever there is no one left between you and your audience to play gatekeeper.

What kinds of transactions would you like to see between nodes?

No, Urbit doesn't require an always-on connection. It does work better with an always-on connection, since its peers will send it a lot of events to process as soon it reappears after a long absence.

> This also means that all apps have full access to all your money, private info, bank accounts etc.?

If you wanted to write or install an app that had access to a hot wallet stored on your Urbit ship, for example, you could. It doesn't have access to secrets you haven't intentionally stored on your Urbit. When you say "all apps have full access" - what do you mean? For example you could write an app that is both a display case for POAPs and also spies on your private messages, but the actual app that is a display case for POAPs is written to have no way to access your messages: is this the question you were asking?

What exactly do you see as obfuscated?

This is what my company is building on Urbit: https://uqbarnetwork.medium.com/introducing-uqbar-network-6b...

Having a large audience of pre-existing users is nice (and ditto for dev ecosystem for tooling and libraries) but ultimately what makes Urbit a good idea is, as Josh says, that we want computers to primarily be doing one set of things and they were originally designed to do a different set of things (with the things they currently do added as a complicated afterthought). A blockchain protocol is in the end a p2p application. It benefits hugely from running on a natively p2p networked operating system with a built-in cryptographic identity infrastructure. If Urbit's technology works, people are going to build on top of it because they need it, and their customers will come to use what they've built because it works better. If the tech didn't work, it wouldn't matter how many people tried it.

You're correct that there is no "Urbit Store" analogous to the Apple Store or the Android Store (this is a feature not a bug for many users, although I sympathize with both perspectives). I'm not sure what you mean about installing apps being arduous - currently you start typing the developer's name into the homepage search bar, it autocompletes, you are given a list of apps they've published, you click the one you're interested in, installation is a few seconds to a few minutes.