Decentralized vs. Centralized Apps
Today, your app probably works something like this:
- A user installs your app or navigates to your app’s url.
- The user signs in with a username and password, or an account likely tied to a major identity provider such as Google or Apple.
- Using that provided identity as a key, your app then creates a set of entries in your databases, likely hosted by a cloud provider such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
- As your user begins using your app, the app’s frontend will repeatedly make calls to a backend that you’ve stood up on your cloud provider to query databases and provide data to the user.
Reading this over, you’ll realize just how much of a dependency both your app and your user take on 3rd party providers. While this has been a stable model for developers for well over a decade, user identity, user data, app data, and app infrastructure are all hosted by 3rd parties. Web5 changes this by restoring control back to end users via the following flow:
- A user installs or navigates to your app’s url.
- The user signs in to your app with an account tied to their Decentralized Identifier (DID).
- Using that provided identity as a key, your app then creates a set of entries in the user’s Decentralized Web Node (DWN), a personal data store which they host and own. DWN management can be simplified for end users through the use of a wallet, making decentralized apps accessible to average end users.
- As your user begins using your app, the app’s frontend will repeatedly make calls to the user’s DWN to query and provide data to the user. If there is app data needed, the app will query the app’s infrastructure DWNs to retrieve that information.
You’ll notice that while data ownership and location radically changed between these two models, nothing changed for the end user! That means that as a developer, all you need to do to provide the benefits of a web5 application to both yourself and your end users is to simply change where your data is stored.
#web5
source:
https://developer.tbd.website/docs/web5/apps/upgrade-to-web5/#decentralized-vs-centralized-apps
