A Desktop Version of MetaMask

[cjeria]

User Experience Download MetaMask (from Mac App store) locally on your machine. Enable communication between browser and my native MetaMask app.

Perceptually More Secure From a UX standpoint, a local version of the app may feel more secure because MetaMask feels more "local" to my machine. It also makes MetaMask feel more important/essential as an "App" rather than a small/invisible browser extension. This is not to say we couldn't leverage the extension for lightweight functionality.

Implications This UX implies many technical hurdles (like access to the blockchain, nodes etc), but IF it improves the UX 10 fold, we may want to take a closer look at this solution.

Features In your local MetaMask app, provide users the ability to decide which browser to communicate with from within the MetaMask app. So you download MetaMask once, select your default browser to use MetaMask with. Go about using MetaMask in the same way and do all the cool things that we currently do,... and more.

[danfinlay]

This could improve performance too, because we could use native clients for Ethereum & other p2p protocols.

[danfinlay]

Here is someone making a large pitch for this feature: https://github.com/aragon/nest/pull/20

[ghost]

Also, the vision of kitsunet (network of p2p peers, each containing a small portion of the state), could make use of different degrees of "hubs", which mean, nodes that can store a little more information to share to the rest of the peers. Desktop version fits well to this picture.

[ghost]

So, we could have a light "extension version", with minimal versions, with constant "get X and Y feature by getting the desktop version".

Now, is important to have the low-resource version always! Remember that we are looking at you, IoT device wanting to join kitsunet

[cjeria]

Concept design for this feature

[danfinlay]

Hawt!