Steemit Development Incentive Programme - My First Proposal

It has been a while I blogged on the Steemit blockchain. Have been dealing with severe economic and financial crisis that I even had to power down, but things are better now, so, I've stopped the power down process. On visiting the blockchain, I saw a sign of something new coming to the blockchain, and I believe with this, Steemit will not remain the same in a few months from now.

What am I talking about? The Steemit Development Incentive Programme which is clearly designed to make Steemit a better blockchain and more competitive. In the spirit of decentralization, the Steemit team gave every member of the Steem blockchain an opportunity to make a proposal on what should be done to make Steemit better, and presented in this post is my humble proposal.

Steemit Needs an Official Mobile Application

This is a significant issue to me. I consider Steemit.com more than good enough, and doesn't need much to be built on it for now, more efforts should be channeled towards providing a more mobile friendly frontend. You will say there are apps already to access Steemit, but I say there is nothing usable for now.

Steemit has made several attempts to creating a mobile app, but I consider them failed attempts, the available apps right now, are apps you will not want to use, trust me. Let's right this.

Why We Need a Mobile App

There are many benefits to using a mobile app instead of relying on a website, and I know we all appreciate those benefits. Here are some of them:

• Push notifications: Trust me, push notifications makes a lot of a difference in user experience when it comes to using a social service such as Steemit. After blogging, one needs to return to Steemit.com to keep track of engagements on his/her blog which we have gotten used to, but could be much better with an app. Through push notifications, you receive instant notifications when someone comments, or votes on your content, and you don't risk losing out important events.

• Better engagement: Steemit is a social blogging tokenized platform and engagement doesn't have to feel like so much work. A mobile app will increase organic engagement on Steemit from 30% to almost 70% or more. It will mean, more post comments, and more upvotes.

• Lesser barrier to onboarding: Humans have developed an interesting level of appreciation of mobile apps over websites, and other alternatives. Most persons that were interested in Steemit at first, were deterred by the processes, among which opening a browser and visiting a website seems like so much work already. We can eliminate this barrier by simply providing a mobile app, with which Steemit will feel more natural to them like traditional social media platforms.

• More ability to build: Steemit.com is the foundation of the Steemit blog, and you can't do a lot of experimentation on it. But with a mobile app, the Steemit team of developers could build a lot on it and experiment on a lot of features without the risk of breaking anything.

The new "Steemit Mobile Application"

My vision of the new Steemit mobile app is simple, yet game changing. Here are some features it will have:

• The feed: This should be the first page presented the user containing posts from their followings and community subscriptions.
• The compose & publish: This should be a basic markdown editor with ability to have post previews that enables a user to write posts, apply basic markdowns, preview, save drafts and publish.
• Notifications: This section houses all the notifications for a user including new likes (upvotes), and dislikes (downvotes) as well as comments and mentions.
• Wallet: This section should contain SP balance and worth, post rewards claiming, details of staked and unstaked Steem and user SBD values.
• User profile: This section contains the user profile showing his/her blogs, reblogs, comments, profile settings, etc.

There is a lot more than can be built into an app, and the development teams creativity is the limit, but I expect the app to have a few quality of life features such as:

• Beautiful and fluid user interface (UI)
• Less animations for better fluidity
• Night mode (very important)
• Light weight
• Backwards compatible to at least Android 6 Marshmallow and iOS 12
• A pin code to decrypt users keys before logging in.
• Social sharing built in

The Cost

Building a Steemit frontend mobile app shouldn't be a lot of work as most assets are already prepared for the implementation, the main work is to link the Steemit.com base to a mobile app. I am no developer by any means, butI believe since the work is to smoothly provide a mobile experience of an already existing website, it will require a bit of work, but not as much work as it may if everything is being designed from scratch.

With that out of the way, I did a quick search on what it will take to create a solid mobile app. While I found most developers charging up to the entire budget for the Steemit Development Incentive Programme for just a mobile app, I found that the sweet spot for mobile app development ranges from 5,000 USD to 50,000 USD depending on the type of developers that will be involved and the level of sophistication required.

For the Steemit app development, to get the best results and the best of manpower for the project, I recommend a budget of at least 40,000 USD for initial development and 10,000 USD for ongoing support and development.

Final Words

I don't know if a mobile app can cut into the proposals for Steemit development, but I feel and believe it is a necessity, and I am willing if provided the opportunity to work with any team and brainstorm on how to make things work, and plan the project. A have a few more proposals to present, but for now, the future of Steemit is in a mobile app.