Drasil Contacts

How many times have you, or your friends and family, needed to be reminded of someone's number or email? How many contacts in your address book are filled with outdated information right now? This app provides a way to solve this problem while using awesome decentralized technology.

Drasil Contacts is decentralized app where, instead of trying to manage everyone else's contact info, you only need to manage your own details. Other people request access to this information, and their address books get updated when you update your own details. As long as everyone is able to remember their own phone number, everyone will always an up-to-date address book.

The primary decentralized technologies currently being used are 3box, OrbitDB, Fleek, IPFS, and Metamask. The front-end technology is mainly parcel, react, and tailwind.

I started this project with the goal of having basic functionality in place without using a server, and I needed to understand what (if any) limitations this would impose. The main limitations I found were around the connectivity and resources of mobile devices. My long-term goal for this project is to have a mobile app available on any popular device that could replace their existing contacts app. But mobile apps disconnect and lose power regularly, and so having the features I plan to have for the final version of this app will likely require a server of some type to take requests from mobile devices and then handle communicating with the decentralized services in the background. I will continue to focus on coming up with the best solution for running this app on mobile devices.