Can I submit an app on my own, for which I'm not the developer?
📣 Introducing zap.store 0.1.0
For months I have been dreaming of a better app store, frustrated by big tech's permissioned bs, GPG's complexities, and Obtainium's reliance on centralized services and poor UX.
Here's the first (very alpha) iteration of zap.store, a permissionless app store leveraging the nostr social graph.
✔ Android only (for now! Desktop coming soon)
✔ Obtainium drop-in replacement (smaller catalog but growing)
✔ App releases are signed/curated by this account, as developers start self-signing
✔ Web of trust check before installing an app
Get it at https://zap.store or https://github.com/zapstore/zapstore
(SHA-256 hash of the APK version 0.1.0 is 8540bd492064c17d83bcdc6d2a463c2aea46f13c2b0d13b8a96023df95bd0c9d)
Feedback more than welcome, it's also possible to send directly from the ⚙️ screen in the app
s/o to nostr legends nostr:npub149p5act9a5qm9p47elp8w8h3wpwn2d7s2xecw2ygnrxqp4wgsklq9g722q and nostr:npub1zafcms4xya5ap9zr7xxr0jlrtrattwlesytn2s42030lzu0dwlzqpd26k5 for their invaluable help
Discussion
During the bootstrap phase only this nsec is signing releases but I'm building tools for developers to sign their own.
Since there is no centralized source of truth anyone can claim an app is theirs, hence the importance of the social graph to establish trust and weed out scammers
I think this is a novel approach that does not exist on centralized appstore or play store. For instance nostr:npub16r0tl8a39hhcrapa03559xahsjqj4s0y6t2n5gpdk64v06jtgekqdkz5pl can submit an app repo for nostr:npub10r8xl2njyepcw2zwv3a6dyufj4e4ajx86hz6v4ehu4gnpupxxp7stjt2p8 consideration, and review.
Placeholder feature request:
Doesn't that still depend on zap.store repo maintainers approving a PR? Still centralized
But it would be cool to also include apps where their devs don't know/care about nostr.
I was thinking of something like the Arch User Repository (AUR) where users submit packages that are not theirs and it's up to other users whether they trust it or not.