The Developer Tooling & Ecosystem working group is focused on making Flow the most user-friendly Web3 developer platform. Success for this group will translate into higher developer satisfaction, reduced friction, and ultimately more applications launched on Flow.
Flow requires robust tools that support the most important developer environments, simplify the development lifecycle, enable fast iterations, and increase developers’ confidence. This area focuses on improvements to various tools, including SDKs, libraries, CLI, Emulator, and the VSCode Extension. Specific projects include, but are not limited to:
Developer education is critical to onboard millions of Flow developers. There is a need to build best-in-class documentation and samples, and a cutting edge developer playground. This requires understanding developer journeys and information architecture as much as the content. Priorities for this working group are:
Mobile applications have the potential to increase user engagement and reach mainstream consumers through app stores. With Flow, mobile developers can improve security through support for Secure Enclave & Keystore, minimize their needs for backend service by building on-chain logic, and ramp up quickly to Cadence – Flow’s smart contract language inspired by modern languages like Swift and Kotlin. This focus area is concerned with bringing the value proposition to light by
The self-custody is perhaps the single most important feature of a web3, but the next billion blockchain users don’t have self-custodial wallets yet. Flow has the potential to unlock the real barrier to mainstream adoption, which is first-time user experience (FTUE). For most new users, the crypto scene currently feels a bit like the wild, wild west. There is a myriad of situations where they are uncertain of how to interact with the wallet and they lack trust and security in the services they are attempting to use. Flow needs to provide tooling for developers to onboard users with wallet-less onboarding via email or social identities so they can get immediate value seamlessly and then upgrade to self-custody when they’re ready or as the app demands it.
Demonstrate service-less dapps to eliminate platform risks, create trust, and unlock new experiences
Flow was designed to enable new experiences through composable building blocks that improve transparency. Getting more on-chain logic on Flow is critical to enable this future. Flow’s account model, modern smart contract language, and multi-node architecture enable on-chain mechanics with great user experiences without needing backend services. This focus area will use gaming as the primary use case by delivering:
Flow is building a vibrant ecosystem of builders to fill essential web3 building blocks, like tools and services. The Developer Grants program is allocating FLOW tokens to support the development of these ecosystem gaps.
Some of the projects listed above are driven by Flow community members who received grants to support their efforts.
If you are interested in participating in the program, you can:
Flow contributors include: Bjarte Karlsen, Alexander Zwerner, Matt Hichana, Tyron Brand, Maggo, Emerald DAO, Inconfido, Flowser, Outblock, GetBlock, SoulMade, Dapper Labs, Dev Spotlight & independent researchers. The working group is building in public and coordinating via the Developer Grants program and GitHub.