Mobile app development has been a mess in the Polkadot ecosystem. The only mobile apps that Polkadot has gotten were mobile wallets. Development of other mobile apps like the Official Polkadot app must have been very difficult and probably that is why it cost the 1M$ and faced delays. I believe that this trend will continue with the current approach to mobile app development -> it will stay difficult, slow and expensive to develop mobile apps.

I want to change this trend with this proposal.

Our development team has been working on PlutoFramework since November 2024.

PlutoFramework Overview

PlutoFramework is an all-in-one framework for building mobile decentralised applications. It aims to help speed up the development of mobile applications on Polkadot. Actually, it has sped it up already now. And also reduces cost of development significantly.

Learn more here: https://plutolabs.gitbook.io/plutoframework

Target audience

• New projects that do not have a front-end part built yet and wish to have a mobile app instead of a web app. Good choice. ^^
• Mature projects that wish to expand to mobile audience.

Is PlutoFramework production ready?

Yes!

PlutoFramework has been used for development of realXmarket by Xcavate since January 2025. It has been proven by this app that it is ready to be used for production apps. We have learned a lot from the development of the realXmarket app and we have taken a lot of feedback to improve PlutoFramework further. The realXmarket app is opensourced here: https://github.com/XcavateBlockchain/realXmarketMobileApp

Why this proposal?

We want to keep it fully open-sourced, well maintained and well documented. This takes us a lot of extra time and that is why we think it is fair to get a grant from the Polkadot Treasury for our public good commitment.

Potential to bring more developers

We are also actively trying to bring new developers to build on Polkadot. And frankly quite successfully - at the end of June, a very talented developer called Valentyn started contributing to PlutoFramework repository and during the Polkadot Hackathon in Berlin organized by WebZero, he began to build a Polkadot Roots application: https://github.com/valentynhol/PolkadotRoots. He was completely new to Web3 and thanks to PlutoFramework, he was able to quickly figure out how to use Substrate and use it to build his first mobile application.

Dušan also formed a team during the same hackathon with a new developer Petr (not Petr Pavliš). They are now trying to build a DAO mobile application using ink! smart-contracts, also a first ever mobile app with ink!. Petr is also committed to finishing this application + potentially creating an extra tooling to allow other developers to create mobile apps for their ink! smart contracts.

Because this uses a completely different techstack compared to PAPI, it expands the room for more developers - this attracts different kind of developers compared to PAPI. Refer to techstack: https://plutolabs.gitbook.io/plutoframework/about-plutoframework/tech-stack

Innovation

As always, we are trying to innovate. PlutoFramework is no different. Many things that have been developed have never been developed before. A lot of research had to be done. We are contributing with new innovative ideas.

Marketting efforts

Me, Petr and Valentyn have visited PBA in Lucerne and gave a special guest lecture to PBA students.

I presented at Web3 Summit in Berlin (Video recording will be on social media soon).

History of the project

Read the previous discussion here: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/3294

What has been developed over past 9 months

Feature	Man-hours
PlutoFramework Research + Refactor of the file structure, code structure, VS solution structure and csproj references + Nuget package	60
PlutoFrameworkAppTemplate	30
2 Sample Proof of Concept apps (https://plutolabs.gitbook.io/plutoframework/example-application/koda.art-mobile-app + https://plutolabs.gitbook.io/plutoframework/example-application/polkadot-app-clone)	20
Entire UI Components data loading has been redesigned and optimised for fast, parallel, multichain querying	80
Control Templates for UI Components and Controls (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/fundamentals/controltemplate?view=net-maui-9.0)	40
Visual Studio Item Templates (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/creating-project-and-item-templates?view=vs-2022) for Pages and Popups	8
dotnet 9 update	20
Faucet	16
Credits page	2
Hydration price oracle over time	10
Json import/export, mnemonic onboarding explanation page and simplified onboarding	16
Balance UI Component refactored, Balance querying functions refactored and optimised	40
Image loading optimised with use of FFImage	5
Asset freezes and reserves (Components and UI related to it)	80
iOS support, fixing and optimising iOS specific bugs, setting up the environment	120
Transaction Analyzer now analyzes NFT changes	10
Display more info for extrinsics	20
Currency formatting can be modified	5
DIDs can be saved and maintained in app, no need for Sporan Wallet	80
SumSub KYC	40
Simple unified way of adding new endpoints	10
Improved popups with fancy animations, blurred background, unified way of creating new popups, unified way of controlling popups	30

• Hourly rate: 130 USD/hour (including VAT and other expenses)
• Total hours: 762 hours
• Total: 99060 USD

Plans for next 2 months of development

Feature	Man-hours estimate
new dedicated Balances page	80
Asset detail page - expandable, modifiable	160
Updated documentation and guides	40

• Hourly rate: 130 USD/hour (including VAT and other expenses)
• Total hours: 280 hours
• Total: 36400 USD

Medium-term future plans

We are also thinking long term. I would like to share what we are currently researching to develop next. We do not know the exact implementation details for these features. That is why I am not including them as part of this proposal. Yet, we are committed to make them a reality in the upcoming months.

1. Video Tutorials

We are in the middle of discussions to make interactive PBA-X style tutorials, that would be published on Youtube and other platforms if requested ^^

One of our friends made an incredible video compilation from EthPrague and Polkadot roots meetup: https://youtu.be/w7rX6mqjRMA?si=llW_UwEYmyFGN874

We are aiming for similar quality.

2. Notifications

Apps need it to engage users. Valentyn is actively doing research on this topic to make the use of push notifications with web3 apps as simple as possible.

3. AI based tooling

Some developers like to vibe code. It would be cool to make it easy.

We are in discussion with 1 student from CTU FIT focusing on AI.

4. UI Component Documentation Generator

While we have included the description, screenshots and how to use guide for majority of the reusable UI components, it is far from ideal. We had to include each UI component by hand. This could lead to fast deprecation and difficult maintenance of the documentation.

We are researching a solution that would fix all of these issues. The documentation would be generated according to the code with each new release of the Nuget package. The screenshots would be replaced with the actual version of the xaml compiled UI and the UI in the docs could reflect the custom design changes made to your app.

We have never seen a solution like this on the market, it was Dušan's idea. It would make it the most advanced, the most modern documentation ever.

Other expenses

I have already spent a lot of my own money to get the iOS version working. To keep scaling the development of PlutoFramework and to keep the iOS version on the same level as the android part, we need an extra macbook hardware + extra iPhone for testing the app during development phase.

Expense	cost in USD
Apple developer account 1 year subscription	100
2x iPhone 16 pro	2828 (2 x 29990 CZK as of 1.8.2025)
Macbook Pro 16	4387 (92990 CZK as of 1.8.2025)

• Total: 7315 USD

Please notice that I have invested a lot of my own money into owning a top of the line laptop for development to develop as fast as possible. I think it was the best investment I could have done for myself. These expenses are well worth it and will save tens of hours for us from development.

Developers and Contributors

Rostislav Litovkin

• Main developer
• PBA alumnus

Valentyn Holovko

• developer

Dušan Jánsky

• developer
• PBA alumnus

Jaromír Procházka

• developer

Petr Pavliš

• developer, UX focus
• Beta tester

Daniel Vaculík

• Idea maker
• Lawyer
• Beta tester

Bye bye, thank you for reading! <3

Written by Rosťa, main developer behind PlutoFramework