Mini apps will eat the internet

Every time I open my mouth right now, there's a 69% chance "Mini App" is about to come out, so let's talk about it.

In case you missed it, YB published a great article that covers a lot of ground on the concept of Mini Apps, the lore behind the idea, and why they might just be the next logical evolution of Farcaster Developer logos.

Before we pull out the crystal ball and dive into the future of where this all goes, let's quickly recap what's already happened in the past 2 weeks since the term "Mini App" started to proliferate around our little corner of the internet.

• Flappycaster became the first "Mini App" supported by Warpcast - over 3k unique users.

• Recaster integrated a Payflow Moxie/Degen Claim Mini App as an embedded feature

• Recaster tested "deep links" - opening mini apps in the feed by interacting with a frame

David makes a great point here, and while he was in no way inferring that Mini Apps solve this, they actually do.

Mini apps enable your user's first experience of your product to bypass all the tedious steps and jump straight into the action. They do this by authenticating a user from any FC client from a simple frame interaction by verifying and tapping into the data instantly.

Farcaster accounts are some of the most data-rich public user profiles on the internet, something many still overlook. The depth and breadth of insights you can distill about an individual in a second are kind of crazy and largely untapped.

Perhaps the most incremental way to think about the "Mini App" experience compared to other dominant Western social platforms is to simply compare the embedded web view experience with the embedded browsers we would see on platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

When you click on anything in either, you typically experience the link in an embedded browser cut off from your usual browser. This results in a lack of context and cookies that interrupt behavior normally more fluid in your default browser—this is only a slight detraction.

Still, how these embedded browsers work doesn't add anything to this experience; they primarily serve as a last-ditch attempt to keep you in their app.

The emergent behavior we see with Farcaster Mini Apps is the addition of the available context. When you open Nook, you save things to your profile while sharing your thoughts with your network. With Flappycaster, you play as your bird and record scores to your profile and the global leaderboard.

This slight change can have a meaningful impact as light interactions accumulate into a deep well of preferences that a product like Nook could use to improve your experiences or build out a fuller experience later after validating the product as a mini app.

I can see almost every feature from frames making its way into Mini Apps over time. My bet would be sooner rather than later. Some devs are already trying to jam Wallet Connect into a Mini App experience. Personally, I think this is a terrible idea, but I respect devs doing what they can when they can't do what they want.

We have a test client for prototyping concepts. We've added transaction and signature interactions and experimented with methods for two-way messaging between a mini app and the client, based mainly on Telegrams Web App SDK and approach.

It quickly became apparent that a similar FC version was viable and could be extremely powerful. Blowing open the design space for how clients could differentiate and the opportunity for more apps to go viral, an opportunity we haven't seen before in crypto. Outside of a handful of NFTs and meme coins, few apps/products have "blown up" outside of a few notable exceptions like Topshot & Pump.fun

As mini apps mature, we should begin to see categories emerge—many will fall into your classic "productivity/gaming/entertainment" categories. However, I also think it's reasonable to expect massively singular-focus apps to rise to popularity in the communities that care about them.

So much so that new clients/platforms will likely emerge that embrace certain apps over others to provide the ideal user experience for their target demographic.

Right now, the outsider's perspective of "Decentralized Social" is that it is a less polished, less diverse Twitter with a "content problem." In my personal opinion, no social platform has ever achieved critical mass without sufficient novelty.

These novelties seem small and almost benign, but consider how crucial these features were to their platform's success.

Twitter: Micro-blogging

Facebook: News Feed

Instagram: Photo Filters

Snapchat: Ephemeral Messaging 

Tiktok: Licensed Music Integration

Frames were the first "Novelty" that really separated Farcaster from the pack, but their slideshow like experience led to their popularity faltering and generally dulled what is otherwise a novel and powerful tool - Mini apps could be a natural evolution from frames and potentially even be the linchpin which set's our network apart.

The "Post Mini App" impression of a decentralized social could be a diverse network of apps and experiences instead of "Twitter with a content problem."

I would also bargain that Mini apps will start becoming more platform agnostic. The same application will be available to different users wherever they are, be that a Farcaster client, a Telegram group chat, or a blink or similar primitive that might appear anywhere on the internet a link would appear—this scope only covers the existing platforms where the Mini App or similar primitive exists.

If I were so bold, I would say that a sufficient supply of Mini apps will lead to a massive uptick in deeper Farcaster integrations in crypto native applications like wallets.

If this happens, it could lead to more apps using Farcaster as a central building block in their app foundations. Adding a signer to your wallet app could become the norm—maybe even account creation. These wallets can begin serving mini apps to their users, essentially bootstrapping new features and engaging content that would be too cumbersome/risky to prioritize themselves.

Knowing that the further forward we look, the more we are likely to get wrong, I'll keep this section brief and sweet; here are a couple of bets/predictions I would make:

Mini app popularity grows over time, becoming a net new channel available across the internet.

A breakout consumer app is born as a mini app, grows a vibrant community of users within crypto, launches its own mobile app, and breaks out into mainstream consciousness.

The breadth and depth of mature mini apps give rise to a new class of aggregator applications that resemble WeChat's utility but are specialized for their users.

Leading to what I would call the "Networked Super App" - a composable hyperstructure that acts as a new kind of operating system that combines the best of social, crypto, and adjacent consumer products into a plug-and-play ecosystem that enables entirely new experiences the western world can't yet fathom.

This last one is a bit of stretch, after all - crystal balls can only see so far.