A Decentralized App Store Using the Blockchain Technology

Today, applications have become an important part of the ecosystem of smartphones. With the increasing use of applications, key issues such as avoidance of single point of failure, availability, throughput problem, ensuring software authenticity, protecting the intellectual property rights of application developers have become areas that have a significant impact on this ecosystem. In this paper, we introduce the first autonomous decentralized mobile application distribution platform (app store) that utilizes blockchain, smart contracts and a distributed file system to fulfill the aforementioned requirements. With the use of smart contracts, this app store works autonomously, and its management is not centralized. In addition, the app store does not have single point of failure, availability, and download throughput problem thanks to its distributed design. Comparison to related works shows our proposed app store is superior to competing proposals and existing app stores in several aspects.