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App store designed · not yet built

The listings live on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. The reviews are signed endorsements you filter by who you trust. Nobody approves what ships — but you decide whose word to believe.

The problem this fixes

Every existing app store is one company deciding what runs on your device. That company can be pressured — by governments, by competitors, by its own politics — and every developer above them stands or falls on their whim. Sideloading exists as an escape hatch but with none of the discovery, updates, or verification that make a store useful.

A store without a gatekeeper needs two things it usually can't have at once: a canonical listing nobody can rewrite, and a review system that isn't captured by whoever votes hardest.

How the design solves both

  1. Listings are on-chain records. Same shape as BNS name registrations, under a new prefix (APS1). One record per app: name, description, icon, version, APK / installer SHA-256, and the signing-cert fingerprint the client must match on install. Payload is a hash — the full manifest lives on Sia.
  2. Anyone can list. That's the point. Publishing a listing costs a small on-chain fee and needs no permission. Removing something you don't own is impossible. Store operators — if they exist — curate what they surface, they don't gatekeep what exists.
  3. Reviews are signed endorsements you filter. An endorsement is a signed on-chain statement: "I, alice.bch, vouch for app X." Your client filters endorsements by trust lists you subscribe to — a security researcher's list, a friend's, your own. A one-star review from a bot you don't follow simply doesn't render. Token-curated registries and formal reputation come later.
  4. Install verifies against the chain. The Ariadne client pulls the APK from wherever the listing says (Sia, server, mirror), checks the SHA-256 against the on-chain record, checks the signing cert against the fingerprint in the record, and only then installs. Same principle as verifying a website: the chain is the truth, not the mirror.

Where it fits

The frontend .bch site

Browse, search, and read the listing pages in any browser via the relay, or natively in Theseus and Ariadne.

The listings on chain

Records under the APS1 prefix, indexed by the same Argus engine that already reads BNS. Adding the record type is a small change, not a new blockchain.

The verified install via Ariadne

Mobile-track slice: an "install with on-chain hash + cert verification" flow inside the Ariadne Android app. That's the reason the store frontend and the resolver ship as one story.

Status: designed, not built. The proposal lives in _coordination/sessions/mobile-resolver.md. A protocol addition (APS1 record type) and a frontend track are the two open pieces. The trust-list review system starts permissionless; formal token- curated registries are a Phase 2 conversation, not a launch requirement.