tl;dr

Building on the success of Proposal 40, which funded an iOS app with widgets to help with missed auctions and proposals, this proposal seeks to integrate all L2 DAOs and expand to the Android platform to help more users. I request 4,2 ETH for development and coverage of support and infrastructure costs for one year.

L1

To help with missed auctions and proposals, Proposal 40 funded the creation of iOS widgets that allow tracking them right from the phone's Home Screen.

After some consideration, it’s been decided to build and launch the full-featured app in the App Store, as it will provide easier setup, better usability and more mobile features.

On 29.08.2023 app went live on the Apple App Store. App can also be found on its marketing site: builderapp.wtf.

After the launch many people installed and used the app to track the Daos they are part of.

Even though the main purpose of the first version was to create an easier widget onboarding experience I have added several features to make the app more interesting to use on its own:

• I have introduced the Feed screen that aggregates all proposals from all followed DAOs, so you can see in one place how many props you have to vote on.
• Basic auction tracking and Dao pages have been added to make it easier to track auctions.
• Proposal reading has been added using a modified version of nouns.build website (when you click on a proposal, the website page loads in the app, so you can read the proposal)

Those additions, even though quite limited, made the app more useful on its own, as can be seen from the analytics. Below are some graphs to see the App usage since the beta testing opened:

Weekly screen views. (How many screens people viewed in the given week. Similar to the View Count for the website)

Unique weekly active users (How many unique people opened the app at least once in the given week).

As can be seen from the charts, there has been a gradual reduction in usage since the launch in the App Store (end of the summer). One of the reasons is that I had to remove all of the web links from the app, that were available in beta and allowed to vote/bid staying in the app. Unfortunately, Apple has a crazy stance on anything related to NFTs and doesn’t allow any bidding or voting functionality to be available to users. But even with those functionalities removed, people kept using the app to track their DAOs. The app saw only one “no app open” week and its lowest usage was in April 2024, as the most active Daos started moving to Base L2.

Widgets Usage Unfortunately, there is no accurate way to measure widget installs without collecting personal data and we can only estimate installs based on the calls from widgets to data API endpoints. Based on rough estimates, I can assume that there are about 30-70 active widgets installed.

What can be accurately tracked is which DAOs the widgets were installed for. Members of these 13 DAOs installed the widgets on their phones: Builder, Purple, Public Assembly, BLVKHVND, Entropy, Artiva DAO, World Wide Crazy (Nouns), Lil Toadz DAO, JusttheFlamingo, Spores, The Panama DAO, DegenEye, TraitWorks.

Here is also a usage breakdown by the DAO:

We can also track which types of widgets are installed most often by the type of data requested. Here's the breakdown:

Open-Source Additionally, the mobile app has been open-sourced, so community could build on it in the future.

L2 Support

Currently, the app and widgets support only Ethereum Mainnet DAOs. With the launch of L2 support, many active DAOs migrated to L2 and can't stay up to date via widgets or the app.

With this update, I will make sure that the app fully supports all L2 blockchains and DAOs.

Plus, L2 DAOs see more activity due to lower “participation fees” and we need to make sure the app is available to all those new users who want to join and participate in DAOs.

Android

The app currently supports only iOS, but there is one more ecosystem: Android. Not only does it have easier store policies, but allows you to install apps from external marketplaces or directly. This freedom allows apps with unrestricted access to payments/operations with NFTs and crypto. So Android app can support the auction bidding and voting right from the app!

Porting the app(in its current form) to Android will not be a big problem, as 70% of the code will be reused(widgets will have to be recreated from 0, but the app itself will be reused to 90%+).

Additionally, a chunk of work will need to be done on the marketplace side to launch the app. I expect it to be faster and less problematic than Apple(which was a month-long battle to get the app to the App Store) but reserve some time for possible multiple declines during Google Play Store release reviews.

I made polls on Farcaster to see what phones subscribers of Builder, Purple and Nouns Collective channels use. Android phones turned out to be the most used!

Proposal voting and bidding in the app

As Android is more favourable to crypto products, I will add the proposal voting and bidding in the app. I will do it via displaying current web app in the app’s browser. This way it's fast to make, so we can test and make sure we are actually on good grounds with Google about this or if there are still some underwater rocks and we need to move to direct install routes. In the future we can build the native support for proposal reading, voting and auction bidding in the app, so users will have true first class experience.

I’ll also experiment with adding same functionality back to iOS app, so we can have full features parity between both platforms.

Smaller Improvements

There are also additional improvements that are of a lesser scope, but will improve the quality of the app:

Better Widgets

• Add “Tap to Refresh” for the auction widgets. Widgets refresh automatically every 15 min maximum(system limit to preserve energy). But with iOS 17, you can now add a button to update it. So I’ll add a click on the text to load the latest auction data on request.
• Have all your DAOs in one governance widget. Currently, you need to create separate governance widgets per your DAOs. With this update, the widget will become more configurable, so you’ll be able to select what DAOs to display. Only one or all of your 5 DAOs in the same widget? Absolutely.
• Support pending proposals in Auction&Governance widget.
• Other updates by user requests...

Better widget setup instructions

One of the main complaints is the general complexity of the widget setup on iOS. I want to make interactive in-app instructions that will visually show every step of the process to make it easier for people to set up widgets.

More Informative Dao pages

V1 of the app was geared towards widgets functionality and had minimal information on the Dao page. Only current auction and proposals. In this version, I will add more helpful information to the Dao page.

Next growth milestones

Adding L2 support where most active DAOs are now based, coupled with the Android support I expect the app and widgets usage to increase 4-6x to average 30-60+ app users per week with 150-200 active widgets installed and more stable usage through the year.

As we will fully support both platforms, I can create a PR to add app links to nouns.build page, so people can easily discover the app when on their DAO page. This will also help with the discovery and bring the app to more users increasing the usage.

How app link might look like on nouns.build website:

Funding

The requested funding is 4,2 ETH ($15,000 USD at ≈3570 ETH/USD) with one-year coverage for support and infrastructure costs.

Here you can see how the funding will be allocated:

About Me

NG. (Warpcast, X). I launched the Builder mobile app that was funded via Builder Prop 40. All other nounish and not only projects you can find here.

One more thing

An example of how the app widget can be used to always stay up-to-date with the auction: