Add native or local node support for Android

[bbondy]

Android support for gateway was recently added.
This is a placeholder to add support without a gateway to Android too.

Perhaps using go-mobile-ipfs, it has Swift and Kotlin bindings

[lidel]

Afaik we don't have official builds/ for Android, but there is relevant work in the IPFS community.

• @berty created go-mobile-ipfs and continue working on it
  • https://berty.tech/blog/go-mobile-ipfs/
  • https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/gomobile-ipfs

@gfanton do you know how the gateway situation looks like on Android?
(Brave uses it as the backend for handling ipfs:// and ipns:// on Desktop, wondering what our options are on mobile)

[gfanton]

Hey @lidel,
gomobile-ipfs can handle both ipfs:// and ipns:// protocols, it's basically a "desktop" IPFS node with some wrapper and binding for iOS/Android platforms.

The main question is: how do you plan to interact with the gateway? Thinking quickly, we have several approaches in mind:

• We can make the gateway listen on localhost so you will be able to interact with it as you probably do it on desktop. But the main issue with this approach is that every other applications on the device will be able to access the gateway as well (one workaround could be to setup an authentication mecanism, but this would probably be a pain to implement).
• We can make the gateway listen on an Unix Domain Socket, so only your process will be able to access the gateway. This approach is the most secure one (and easy to implement on our side), but might make the implementation more complicated for you since it's not classic TPC/IP anymore. From our experience, we were not able to interact with the gateway through a UDS using React-Native webviews (which itself uses native Android and iOS webviews).
• We can bind a native method to any go-ipfs method (iOS/Android -> Golang), so you could be able to interact with the node directly without any network request involved. This is the same kind of thing we do with the IPFS API using the RequestBuilder: (https://ipfs-shipyard.github.io/gomobile-ipfs/android/ipfs/gomobile/android/RequestBuilder.html). We can probably do something similar for the gateway (?)

What do you think about it?

[lidel]

Somehow related: #13500 (comment) includes an example which is how thin clients could work on mobile (use public gateways instead of libp2p transports to save battery).

[spylogsster]

@gfanton I think the localhost gateway would be fine for now to create the first version. it allows us to reuse core codebase from desktop and check how it would work. do you have any ready-to-use library or some roadmap when it can be used by us?

cc: @bbondy

[gfanton]

I think the localhost gateway would be fine for now to create the first version. it allows us to reuse core codebase from desktop and check how it would work

You should be fine then 😄

do you have any ready-to-use library or some roadmap when it can be used by us

• We originally used Bintray to release our different packages (Core/Bridge for iOS/Android), unfortunately the service has been shutdown and we need to switch to another service.
• We have a roadmap on gomobile-ipfs readme: https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/gomobile-ipfs#roadmap, but the remaining points seems not relevant for your use case.
• The only thing we need to do is to add a TCP listener for the localhost gateway. It could be done quickly since we already have a listener for the API. If you plan to use it, we can add this feature next week.

[spylogsster]

@gfanton would be great, we want to try this

[spylogsster]

waiting ipfs-shipyard/gomobile-ipfs#70

[lidel]

Kubo 0.13 introduced verifiable gateway responses.

This means Brave Mobile does not need to run full libp2p stack anymore, it could take a list of HTTP gateways and fetch content-addressed data over HTTP and still keep ipfs:// in address bar.

Demo / PoC

MVP verifiable retrieval with curl and ipfs-car utility (decodes CAR stream and unpacks files and directories in UnifFS format):

$ npm i -g ipfs-car
$ curl "https://ipfs.io/ipfs/bafybeiakou6e7hnx4ms2yangplzl6viapsoyo6phlee6bwrg4j2xt37m3q?format=car" | ipfs-car
$ ls ./bafybeiakou6e7hnx4ms2yangplzl6viapsoyo6phlee6bwrg4j2xt37m3q/
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Ref.

• https://docs.ipfs.tech/reference/http/gateway/#trusted-vs-trustless
• https://www.npmjs.com/package/ipfs-car / https://www.npmjs.com/package/@ipld/car

[micahscopes]

Any progress on this? I'm running around in circles trying to find a browser that supports IPFS on a local network and also runs on older (<11) versions of Android. Seems like Brave is very close to allowing this and it'd be amazing if this option was available.

What would need to be done to enable this?