Summary
- The Nexis Native Chain Mobile Wallet Adapter (MWA) creates a web socket connection between mobile apps and mobile wallets, allowing native mobile apps to submit transactions for signing
- The simplest way to get started creating Nexis Native Chain mobile applications is with
Nexis Native Chain Mobile’s
React Native packages
@nexis-network-mobile/mobile-wallet-adapter-protocol
and@nexis-network-mobile/mobile-wallet-adapter-protocol-web3js
- React Native is very similar to React with a few mobile quirks
Lesson
Nexis Native Chain Mobile Stack (SMS) is designed to help developers create mobile dApps with a seamless UX. It consists of the Mobile Wallet Adapter (MWA), Seed Vault, and the Nexis Native Chain dApp Store. Most relevant to your development journey is the Mobile Wallet Adapter (MWA). The simplest way to get started is to use the Mobile Wallet Adapter with React Native to create a simple Android app. This lesson assumes you’re familiar with React and Nexis Native Chain programming. If that’s not the case, start our course from the beginning and come back here when you feel ready!Intro To Nexis Native Chain Mobile
In these units, we’ll develop mobile apps that interact with the Nexis Native Chain network. This opens up a whole new paradigm of crypto use cases and behaviors.Nexis Native Chain Mobile Use Cases
Here are a few examples of what Nexis Native Chain mobile development can unlock: Mobile Banking and Trading (DeFi) Most traditional banking right now happens on on native mobile apps. With SMS, you can now bank and trade using native mobile apps with your own wallet, where you hold your own keys. Mobile Gaming with Nexis Native Chain Micropayments Mobile games account for roughly 50% of the video game industry’s total value, largely due to small in-game purchases. However, payment processing fees usually mean these in-game purchases have a minimum of $0.99 USD. With Nexis Native Chain, it’s possible to unlock true micropayments. Need an extra life? That’ll be 0.0001 NZT. Mobile E-Commerce SMS can enable a new wave of mobile e-commerce shoppers to pay directly from their favorite Nexis Native Chain wallet. Imagine a world where you can use your Nexis Native Chain wallet as seamlessly as you can use Apple Pay. To summarize, mobile crypto opens up many doors. Let’s dive in and learn how we can be part of it:How Nexis Native Chain development differs between native mobile apps and web
Nexis Native Chain wallet interaction differs slightly on mobile compared to the web. The core wallet functionality is the same: the wallet holds your private keys and uses them to sign and send transactions. To avoid having different interfaces between wallets, developers abstracted that functionality into the Nexis Native Chain Wallet Adapter standard. This remains the standard on the web. The mobile counterpart is the Mobile Wallet Adapter (MWA). The differences between the two standards are due to the different construction of web vs mobile wallets. Web wallets are just browser extensions that inject wallet adapter functions into thewindow
object of your webpage. This gives
your site access to them. Mobile wallets, however, are native applications on a
mobile operating system. There’s no way to surface functions from one native
application to another. The Mobile Wallet Adapter exists to enable any app,
written in any language, to connect to a native wallet app.
We’ll dig into the specifics of the Mobile Wallet Adapter in a
later lesson, but it effectively opens
a WebSocket between applications to facilitate communication. That way a
separate app can provide the wallet app with the transaction to be signed and
sent, and the wallet app can respond with appropriate status updates.
Supported Operating Systems
At the time of writing, Android is the only mobile OS supported by the Mobile Wallet Adapter. On Android, a WebSocket connection can persist between apps, even when the wallet app is in the background. On iOS, the lifetime of a connection between apps is purposefully limited by the operating system. Specifically, iOS will quickly suspend connections when an app is pushed to the background. This kills the MWA WebSocket connection. This is an inherent design difference between iOS and Android (probably made to preserve battery, network usage, etc). However, this doesn’t mean that Nexis Native Chain dApps can’t run on iOS at all. You can still create a Mobile Web App using the standard wallet adapter library. Your users can then install a mobile-friendly wallet like the Glow Wallet. The remainder of this lesson will focus on developing Android apps with the MWA.Supported Frameworks
Nexis Native Chain Mobile supports a number of different frameworks. Officially supported are React Native and native Android, with community SDKs for Flutter, Unity, and Unreal Engine. Nexis Native Chain SDKs:- React Native ( Regular and Expo )
- Android
From React to React Native
React Native takes the React web framework and applies it to mobile applications. However, while React and React Native feel very similar, there are differences. The best way to understand these differences is to experience them while coding. But, to give you a head start here is a list of some differences to keep in mind:- React Native compiles down to native iOS and Android applications while React compiles down to a collection of web pages.
- In React, you use JSX to program with HTML and CSS. With React Native, you use
similar syntax to manipulate native UI components. It’s more like using a UI
library like Chakra or Tailwind UI. Instead of
<div>
,<p>
, and<img>
you’ll be using<View>
,<Text>
, and<Image>
. - Interactions are different. Instead of
onClick
, you’ll useonPress
and other gestures. - Many standard React and Node packages may not be compatible with React Native. Fortunately, there are React Native counterparts to the most popular libraries and you can often use polyfills to make Node packages available. If you’re not familiar with polyfills, take a look at the MDN docs. In short, polyfills actively replace Node-native libraries to make them work anywhere Node is not running.
- Setting up a development environment in React Native can be challenging. This will require setting up Android Studio to compile to Android and XCode for iOS. React Native has a really good guide for this.
- For regular development and testing, you’ll use a physical mobile device or an emulator to run your code. This relies on a tool called Metro that comes pre-installed. React Native’s setup guide also covers this.
- React Native gives you access to the phone’s hardware that React can’t provide. This includes things like the phone’s camera, accelerometer, and more.
- React Native introduces new config files and build folders. For example, the
ios
andandroid
directories contain platform-specific information. Additionally, there are config files likeGemfile
andmetro.config.js
. Generally, leave all configurations alone and just worry about writing your code, the starting point for which will be inApp.tsx
.
Creating a Nexis Native Chain dApp with React Native
Nexis Native Chain React Native dApps are virtually identical to React dApps. The primary difference is in the wallet interaction. Instead of the wallet being available in the browser, your dApp will create an MWA session with the wallet app of your choosing using a WebSocket. Fortunately, this is abstracted for you in the MWA library. The only difference you’ll need to know is anytime you need to make a call to the wallet you’ll be using thetransact
function, which we’ll talk
about soon.

Reading data
Reading data from a Nexis Native Chain cluster in React Native is the exact same as in React. You use theuseConnection
hook to grab the Connection
object. Using
that, you can get account info. Since reading is free, we don’t need to actually
connect to the wallet.
Connecting to a wallet
Writing data to the blockchain has to happen through a transaction. Transactions have to be signed by one or more private keys and sent to an RPC provider. This virtually always happens through a wallet application. Typical wallet interaction happens by calling out to a browser extension. On mobile, you use a WebSocket to start an MWA session. Specifically, you use Android intents where the dApp broadcasts its intent with thesolana-wallet://
scheme.

transact
function:
Web3MobileWallet
object. You can then use
this to send transactions to the wallet. Again, when you want to access the
wallet, it has to be through the function transact
function’s callback.
Signing and sending transactions
Sending a transaction happens inside thetransact
callback. The flow is as
follows:
- Establish a session with a wallet using
transact
which will have a callback ofasync (wallet: Web3MobileWallet) => {...}
. - Inside the callback, request authorization with the
wallet.authorize
orwallet.reauthorize
method depending on the state of the wallet. - Sign the transaction with
wallet.signTransactions
or sign and send withwallet.signAndSendTransactions
.

You may want to create a
useAuthorization()
hook to
manage the wallet’s authorization state. We’ll practice this in the
Lab.Debugging
Since two applications are involved in sending transactions, debugging can be tricky. Specifically, you won’t be able to see the wallet’s debug logs the way you can see your dApps logs. Fortunately, Logcat on Android Studio makes it possible to see logs from all applications on your device. If you prefer not to use Logcat, the other method you could try is to only use the wallet to sign transactions, and then send them in your code. This allows you to better debug the transaction if you’re running into problems.Releasing
Deploying mobile applications can be difficult on its own. It’s often even more difficult when it’s a crypto app. There are two main reasons for this: customer safety and financial incentives. First, most of the mobile app marketplaces have policies restricting blockchain involvement. Crypto is new enough that it’s a regulatory wildcard. Platforms feel they’re protecting users by being strict with blockchain-related apps. Second, if you use crypto for “purchases” in-app, you’ll be seen as circumnavigating the platform’s fee (anywhere from 15-30%). This is explicitly against app store policies as the platform is trying to protect its revenue stream. These are hurdles for sure, but there’s hope. Here are some things to keep in mind for each marketplace:- App Store (iOS) - We only talked about Android today for the technical MWA reason. However, their policies are also some of the most strict and make it hard for Nexis Native Chain dApps to exist. For now, Apple has some pretty strict anti-crypto policies. Wallets seem to be fine, but they’ll flag and likely reject anything that seems like a purchase using crypto.
- Google Play (Android) - Google is generally more relaxed, but there are still a few things to be aware of. As of this writing in November ‘23, Google is rolling out new crypto policies to make it more clear what they will and will not allow. Take a look.
- Steam - Does not allow crypto games at all
“built on blockchain technology that issue or allow the exchange of cryptocurrencies or NFTs.”
- Download Sites / Your Site - Depending on the target platform, you can make your dApp available for download on your own site. However, most users are wary of downloading mobile applications from websites.
- dApp Store (Nexis Native Chain) - Nexis Native Chain saw the issues with mobile dApp distribution on other platform app stores and decided to make their own. As part of the SMS stack, they created the Nexis Native Chain dApp Store.
Conclusion
Getting started with mobile Nexis Native Chain development is fairly straightforward thanks to SMS. While React Native is slightly different than React, the code you have to write is more similar than different. The primary difference is that the portion of your code that interacts with wallets will exist within thetransact
callback. Remember to look at our other lessons if you need a
refresher on Nexis Native Chain development more broadly.
Lab
Let’s practice this together by building a simple Android mobile counter dApp with React Native. The app will interact with the Anchor counter program that we made in the Intro to client-side Anchor development lesson. This dApp simply displays a counter and allows users to increment the count through a Nexis Native Chain program. In this app, we’ll be able to see the current count, connect our wallet, and increment the count. We’ll be doing this all on Devnet and will be compiling only for Android. This program already exists and is already deployed on Devnet. Feel free to check out the deployed program’s code if you want more context. We’ll write this application in vanilla React Native without a starting template. Nexis Native Chain Mobile provides a React Native template that shortcuts some of the boilerplate, but there’s no better way to learn than to do something from scratch.0. Prerequisites
React Native allows us to write mobile applications using similar patterns as React. However, under the hood, our React code needs to be compiled down to languages and frameworks that work with the device’s native OS. This requires a few prerequisite setup items:-
Set up a React Native dev environment.
Go through the
entire article,
using Android as the target OS. For convenience, we’ve typed out the
high-level steps below. Keep in mind that the source article might change
from the time of writing to when you’re reading this. The source article is
your source of truth here.
- Install dependencies
- Install Android Studio
- Configure ANDROID_HOME environment variable
-
Create a new sample project (this is only used to set up the emulator)
-
If you run into the error
✖ Copying template
, add the--npm
flag at the end
-
If you run into the error
- Run and compile the sample project on your emulator
-
Install and run the Nexis Native Chain fake wallet
-
Install the repo
-
In Android
Studio,
Open project > Navigate to the cloned directory > Select mobile-wallet-adapter/android
-
After Android Studio finishes loading the project, select
fakewallet
in the build/run configuration dropdown in the top right -
For debugging, you’ll want to use
Logcat
. Now that your fake wallet is running on the emulator, go toView -> Tool Windows -> Logcat
. This will open up a console logging out what’s happening with fake wallet.
-
Install the repo
- (Optional) Install other Nexis Native Chain wallets on the Google Play store.
java --version
in your
terminal.
1. Plan out the App’s Structure
Before we do any coding, let’s conceptualize the outline of the app. Again, this app will connect to and interact with the counter program we’ve already deployed to Devnet. To do this, we’ll need the following:- A
Connection
object to interact with Nexis Native Chain (ConnectionProvider.tsx
) - Access to our counter program (
ProgramProvider.tsx
) - Authorization for a wallet to sign and send requests (
AuthProvider.tsx
) - Text to display our counter value (
CounterView.tsx
) - A button to press to increment our count (
CounterButton.tsx
)
2. Create the App
Now that we’ve got some of the basic setup and structure down, let’s scaffold a new app with the following command:counter
.
Let’s make sure everything is set up properly by starting the default app and
running it on our Android emulator.
3. Install Dependencies
We’ll need to add in our Nexis Native Chain dependencies. The Nexis Native Chain Mobile docs provide a nice list of packages and explanations for why we need them:@nexis-network-mobile/mobile-wallet-adapter-protocol
: A React Native/Javascript API enabling interaction with MWA-compatible wallets@nexis-network-mobile/mobile-wallet-adapter-protocol-web3js
: A convenience wrapper to use common primitives from @nexis-network/web3.js, such asTransaction
andUint8Array
@nexis-network/web3.js
: Nexis Native Chain Web Library for interacting with the Nexis Native Chain network through the JSON RPC APIreact-native-get-random-values
Secure random number generator polyfill forweb3.js
underlying Crypto library on React Nativebuffer
: Buffer polyfill; also needed forweb3.js
on React Native
@coral-xyz/anchor
: The Anchor TS client.assert
: A polyfill that lets Anchor do its thing.text-encoding-polyfill
: A polyfill needed to create theProgram
object
4. Create ConnectionProvider.tsx
Let’s start adding our Nexis Native Chain functionality. Create a new folder calledcomponents
and within it, a file called ConnectionProvider.tsx
. This
provider will wrap the entire application and make our Connection
object
available throughout. Hopefully, you’re noticing a pattern: this is identical to
the React patterns we’ve used throughout the course.
5. Create AuthProvider.tsx
The next Nexis Native Chain provision we’ll need is the auth provider. This is one of the main differences between mobile and web development. What we’re implementing here is roughly equivalent to theWalletProvider
that we’re used to in web
apps. However, since we’re using Android and its natively installed wallets, the
flow to connect and utilize them is a bit different. Most notably, we need to
follow the MWA protocol.
We do this by providing the following in our AuthProvider
:
accounts
: If the user has multiple wallets, different accounts are maintained in this array of Accounts.selectedAccount
: The current selected account for the transaction.authorizeSession(wallet)
: Authorizes (or reauthorizes, if token is expired) thewallet
for the user and returns an account which will act as the selected account for the session. Thewallet
variable is from the callback of thetransact
function you call independently anytime you want to interact with a wallet.deauthorizeSession(wallet)
: Deauthorizes thewallet
.onChangeAccount
: Acts as a handler whenselectedAccount
is changed.
getPublicKeyFromAddress(base64Address)
: Creates a new Public Key object from the Base64 address given from thewallet
objectgetAuthorizationFromAuthResult
: Handles the authorization result, extracts relevant data from the result, and returns theAuthorization
context object
useAuthorization
hook.
Since this provider is the same across virtually all apps, we’re going to give
you the full implementation that you can copy/paste. We’ll dig into the details
of MWA in a future lesson.
Create the file AuthProvider.tsx
in the components
and paste in the
following:
6. Create ProgramProvider.tsx
The last provider we need is our program provider. This will expose the counter program we want to interact with. Since we’re using the Anchor TS client to interact with our program, we need the program’s IDL. Start by creating a root-level folder calledmodels
, then
create a new file anchor-counter.ts
. Paste the contents of the
Anchor Counter IDL into this
new file.
Next, create the file ProgramProvider.tsx
inside of components
. Inside we’ll
create the program provider to surface our program and the counter PDA:
7. Modify App.tsx
Now that we have all our providers, let’s wrap our app with them. We’re going to re-write the defaultApp.tsx
with the following changes:
- Import our providers and add in our polyfills
- Wrap the app first with
ConnectionProvider
, thenAuthorizationProvider
, and finallyProgramProvider
- Pass in our Devnet endpoint to the
ConnectionProvider
- Pass our cluster to the
AuthorizationProvider
- Replace the default internal
<View>
with<MainScreen />
, a screen we’ll build in the next step
8. Create MainScreen.tsx
Now, let’s put everything together to create our UI. Create a new folder calledscreens
and a new file called MainScreen.tsx
inside of it. In this file, we
are only structuring the screen to display two yet-to-be-created components:
CounterView
and CounterButton
.
Additionally, in this file, we’re introducing React Native’s StyleSheet
. This
is another difference from regular React. Don’t worry, it behaves very similarly
to CSS.
In screens/MainScreen.tsx
paste the following:
9. Create CounterView.tsx
TheCounterView
is the first of our two program-specific files.
CounterView
’s only job is to fetch and listen for updates on our Counter
account. Since we’re only listening here, we don’t have to do anything
MWA-related. It should look identical to a web application. We’ll use our
Connection
object to listen for the programAddress
specified in
ProgramProvider.tsx
. When the account is changed, we update the UI.
In components/CounterView.tsx
paste the following:
10. Create CounterButton.tsx
Finally, we have our last component, theCounterButton
. This floating action
button will do the following in a new function incrementCounter
:
- Call
transact
to get access to a mobile wallet - Authorize the session with
authorizeSession
from theuseAuthorization
hook - Request a Devnet airdrop to fund the transaction if not enough Devnet NZT is available
- Create an
increment
transaction - Call
signAndSendTransactions
to have the wallet sign and send the transaction
The fake Nexis Native Chain wallet we use generates a new keypair every
time you restart the fake wallet app, requiring that we want to check for funds
and airdrop every time. This is for demo purposes only, you can’t do this in
production.
CounterButton.tsx
and paste in the following:
11. Build and Run
Now it’s time to test that everything works! Build and run with the following command:
- Application does not build → Exit Metro with ctrl+c and try again
- Nothing happens when you press the
CounterButton
→ Make sure you have Nexis Native Chain wallet installed ( like the fake wallet we installed in Prerequisites ) - You get stuck in a forever loop while calling
increment
→ This is likely due to you reaching a Devnet airdrop rate limit. Take out the airdrop section inCounterButton
and manually send some Devnet sol to your wallet’s address (printed in the console)
main
branch of the repository.
Challenge
Your challenge today is to take our app and add a decrement function. Simply add another button and call thedecrement
function on our program. This
instruction already exists on the program and its IDL, so you simply need to
write client code to call it.
After you give it a try on your own, feel free to take a look at the
solution code on the solution
branch.