Ledger Blocking Release of Second EOS App
Bad news. It seems that my version of the Ledger EOS App — the one that includes support for dApps, Chintai, Creating Accounts, Multi-Action Transactions and has a ready-to-go standalone javascript API for other websites to start developing with — won’t be releasing today as promised by Ledger’s developers.
What is my version of the EOS Ledger app?
My version is a project that competed with Cryptofairy’s in the Ledger Bounty Contest competing for $50,000. It is an open-source code base available to the EOS community on my github.
Why launch a second EOS app?
I’ve been in talks with Ledger about releasing a second EOS app since about Sept 5th (the day after the contest ended and Cypherglass picked Cryptofairy as the winner).
Why? Because I had the features that his app was missing, and after spending hundreds of hours building the device code for the ledger and the MEOW site I was determined to at least launch the site. I received strong feedback which confirmed that the community would benefit from my app.
It came down to this:
- I had many more features than Cryptofairy.
- I wasn’t able to launch my own site — MEOW — (due to his version being completely incompatible with mine and having no javascript API).
I was screwed… I had to build a new javascript API for his EOS app because I couldn’t launch my project without it, even though I’d built one already for my own app. Since Cryptofairy never made an API and his code was all integrated into the fairywallet, I spent the next 3–4 weeks reverse engineering the wallet to figure out how it signs transactions and communicates with his Ledger EOS app.
Plan A: Help CryptoFairy add the missing features to his app
Why not? It helps both of us and the community… I provided him with the github repos so that he can integrate more features into his Ledger app. I submitted a github issue, he thanked me, closed the issue and I haven’t heard back.
Who knows, maybe something will come of this.
Plan B: Speak to Ledger about getting a second version of the app on their store
This has been my hope for a while now and Ledger received enough comments from the community to approve the idea.
On Oct 16th I received great news that my version would be released on Nov 6th (their policy is to launch new apps on the first Tuesday of the month). The app had already been tested during the contest back in August and no new commits had been made since then. It seemed like a good plan with a realistic deadline.
However things rolled downhill from there.
On Oct 31st I checked in with Ledger to see if the release was on track. I was ignored all week until Sunday (Nov 4th) when I found out they hadn’t done any testing yet… Two days before the supposed launch.
And then I received this message:
With one business day to go before the launch I was told that testing could not even begin until I created a step-by-step guide for how to create an EOS account.
The guide I made for them skipped over this step as it seemed far too basic and was not listed as a requirement in their support documentation, also:
- Most users who want my app have a genesis account and want to migrate over to ledger, or…
- They already have a ledger account and just want better dApp support.
- For the minority who know nothing about EOS, there are plenty of account creation services ready to be found on Google. Some offer account creation for profit, some offer custom short account names, who am I to decide which is the single official method and publicly support it in Ledgers documentation?
Since I had previously supplied them with a 24 word wallet seed so they could use our EOS testing account on the mainnet (…and so had Cryptofairy during the contest) they had at least two EOS accounts available to them for testing. Their request was ridiculous and clearly meant to provide an excuse to delay the release.
I was definitely misled by Ledger and more importantly, I was not the only one. I’ve had the notice on the MEOW homepage for 2–3 weeks and the EOS 42 team wrote an article about how this release would bring support for Chintai and other dapps.
With the amount of traffic MEOW has received since its launch last month and the added hype for Chintai, it’s not a stretch to say a lot of users may have seen or heard the news and were anticipating this release.
I made it very clear to Ledger that I would not be taking the heat for this, they’ve had months to test everything, if they decided to delay the promised November release I would not cover for them, nor take the blame.
They didn’t appreciate being called out on their B.S. The conversation quickly went sour and I was removed from the eos_alt slack group…
I don’t get paid to develop software for Ledger, the contest is over and I’ve been doing this in my spare time for the community and to improve their product — I already have a fulltime job. I’m appalled at how Ledger treats open-source volunteer developers trying to integrate on their platform and I’ve decided to stop all Ledger development and to focus my time on MEOW instead.
So yeah, it’s unlikely that the second EOS App is going to be released as promised but if Ledger decides to change their mind they’re free to use my code.
The standalone js API and the EOS Ledger app are available on my github. If you have comments or feedback for Ledger, you can find them here on their site.
MEOW is 100% funded by donations from the community, if you’d like to support the site or my work donations to account meow.x are welcome.
altShiftDev is the creator of My EOS Wallet (MEOW), a community owned and ad-free wallet and EOS account viewer on the web. It allows the EOS community to access and manage their EOS accounts with the trusted security of hardware wallets.
