IPFS Mobile

Inspiration

 Our inspiration for this project came through researching distributed systems technology and expirementing with new/free/open source software. Our organization is intended to represent Latinos in Computer Science at the University of Illinois and we recognized an opportunity to build upon the incredible accomplishments of a member of the Latino community. After a few weeks of research on IPFS and watching the Founder Juan Batiz-Benet speak, we knew that he held similar values to our own organization through his continuous contributions to the open source community and dedication to creating a new distributed web that could someday be more efficient, more secure, and more open.

What it does

 IPFS is a peer to peer hypermedia protocol that will allow for a more permanent distributed web. What we have attempted to create is a portal into the world of IPFS from your phone in the hope that we can expose more people to this revolutionary project in an aesthetically appealing and simple fashion. IPFS Mobile currently allows you to search the IPFS network for content.

How we built it

 We built IPFS Mobile through the use of Android studio and an IPFS-Java-api

Challenges we ran into

 Some issues we ran into during development were with the version of Java which we were able to use in android studio, and the ipfs-api's use of java 8. The version differences caused compatibility issues between Android and the -IPFS-api implementing lambda functions. Fortunately we were able to find a workaround thanks to an open source project which brought lambda expressions to java 6 and 7. Additionally, we struggled with establishing a connection to the IPFS network. We were unable to implement a full node in our solution.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

 Despite our troubles connecting to the network, we are still proud of the application we were able to create due to its simplicity and potential to attract more users to IPFS

What we learned

 We learned that there are incredibly talented programmers around the world dedicated to connecting us all in a way that is independent od any central authority.

What's next for IPFS Mobile

  -One of our goals for this app was to have expandability for future additions. What we did is only a portion of IPFS' capability. In the future, we could use it's full node and set it as a potential hosting server.
 -Once FileCoin releases, we will update the app for users to offer their storage for this currency. 
 -Integration with Decentralized Applications running 
      -could be a medium to deploy DApps optimized for phones