The following blog post is on repo we finally made open source which is a proof of concept android app that runs the peernet core internally. The Peernet core team have dedicated effort towards implementing the peernet protocol standard in pure go. This effort has paid off in making the process of porting Peernet to android a straight forward process.

The peernet android app can do the base funtionality of peernet such as sharing a file to the peernet p2p network, utilizing peernets decentralized search to get files from peernets p2p network. From a technical sense your android app can escape NAT, has UDT (A great read on the benefits of UDT: https://www.cs.uic.edu/~ygu/paper/udt-protocol.pdf) built into the app. It’s worth looking at the peernet protocol core repo to understand how does the peernet protocol work (source: https://github.com/PeernetOfficial/core).

How did we link the peernet core to the android application ?

The peernet protcol is in pure Go. This means we can compiler our Go libarary of the ARM architecture. To ensure we can interact with it from kotlin we need to generate a .arr file. To do this we used gomobile to generate the appropirate files and then we just linked them to the android project. The MainActivity calls the go main function to start the network and create a local server on the phone (ex: 127.0.0.1:5125). Once the server is running koltin interacts with the peernet local server via REST API calls (Peernet rest API calls docs: https://github.com/PeernetOfficial/core/tree/master/webapi#readme).

User perpective

The android apk released is not the best design nor has functinality. This is as we mentioned before it’s a proof of concept. The app can currently list the numbers of peers the phone can detect in the peernet public network. A user can add a file to the warehouse and blockchain. The user can view recently added file to the network/search for files in the network using file keywords (at the currect release filename. The following README.md gives a better idea on how we do search indexing and normalization).

Project information

Note: Join the peernet discord channel to discuss more:

We hope you can join us to improve peernet to become a simple and effective p2p network :)

Landing page: https://peernet.org