February may have been a short month, but Airfox engineering crammed a ton of work in. Also, Boston gave us a reprieve on the weather, with several days above 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and one above 70! This is a dramatic difference from the snowpocalypse a few years ago.
At the beginning of the month, we released the first public version of the Airfox mobile app. The key features were the ability to deposit money via boleto, top-up your phone, earn AirToken (AIR) for watching videos, and transfer money instantly to other app users. This was an important milestone for the company, representing months of efforts on the app and the backend architecture, and laying the foundation for all future development efforts.
Shortly before Mobile World Congress, we released an update which added the ability to update your personal profile, the microloan loan application flow, and numerous bug fixes and improvements. Mobile World Congress was a great success for Airfox, and resulted in numerous press hits including Yahoo, Engadget, and Wired in addition to the contacts we made at the event.
In March, we are adding more features to make the app useful in Brazil before beginning our first marketing push. We will be adding more ways to spend balance in the app, more ways to deposit, finishing up the loan application and payment flow, and various features that will help us track app usage, performance, and marketing progress.
AirToken dApp
We are getting closer to releasing the production version of the AirToken dApp. We released a work-in-progress version of the source code last month to the Airfox public github repository to show our progress, but since then much work has been completed. Using the dApp, you will be able to send AIR to users of the Airfox mobile app, withdraw AIR from the mobile app to an ETH wallet, and recharge mobile phones directly (even if they don’t have the Airfox Android app). Funding microloans will come later in 2018, as this is a highly complex feature, but it will also be available from within the dApp.
Some people on our Discord channel have asked us why there are two apps, and what the difference is between the decentralized AirToken app (“The dApp”) and the Airfox Android app. There are several reasons.
dApps must interact with an Ethereum node. The AirToken dApp uses MetaMask, and will be accessed from a version hosted by Airfox, or run locally and against an ETH node hosted yourself. MetaMask and web3, the SDK’s most popular for communicating with ETH nodes, are used within JavaScript applications (such as websites) and are not available for mobile apps. AirToken, like most dApps, runs inside a web browser using the MetaMask browser extension and thus is not currently available as a mobile app.
Also, our target demographic for the Android app is currently lower-to-middle-income consumers in emerging markets, specifically Brazil and Latin America. Very few of these people know what Bitcoin is, let alone Ethereum and the cutting-edge of blockchain technology and decentralized applications. The Airfox Android app earns AirTokens, but to most users they will not understand this is a token running on the Ethereum network, and they will see it more as “loyalty points” (at least at first). Eventually we will be adding features that make the blockchain aspect more obvious for users, but for now we are hiding that aspect to prevent users from getting confused, based on feedback from the focus groups we’ve been running in Brazil. AirToken holders who understand Ethereum can use the dApp to get token utility and interact with the mobile app.
Decommissioning Airfox Browser
Airfox previously released the Airfox Browser for Android, which allowed users to earn AIR. As we stated several times during the token sale, the Airfox Browser was an example app used for demo purposes, and was not production-ready. The Airfox wallet is the app we are building.
We are now decommissioning the Airfox Browser and will soon remove it from the Google Play store. The AIR earned in the browser will be migrated to the new Airfox app. When you register for the Airfox wallet with the same phone number you used to register with the Airfox Browser, you will automatically be awarded the AIR you had previously earned. Please note that the AIR in the Airfox Browser was displayed 100x the true amount, so you will get 1/100 the AIR earned previously, but is real AIR connected to the AirToken platform and the Ethereum network. The value of the AIR is identical.
Keep up to date on all AirToken and Airfox news by following us on Twitter or joining us on Discord.
