Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. Berners-Lee understood that the power of the Web had the potential to radically transform human institutions — governmental, commercial, cultural and educational — to better serve humanity. But much to his horror 30 years later his creation has morphed into a Frankenstein. Mass surveillance, abuse and exploitation of users personal data by commercial and state actors on an unprecedented scale… in the words of Berners-Lee: “We demonstrated that the web had failed instead of served humanity, as it was supposed to have done, and failed in many places”. The increasingly centralised web controlled by a few Internet monopolies “ended up producing—with no deliberate action of the people who designed the platform — a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human.”

Berners-Lee has, for the last 2 years, been working on a new platform, Solid, to reclaim the Web and return it to its democratic roots. Solid applications are decoupled from the data they produce, so users will have control over their data and who they choose to share it with. Solid eliminates vendor lock-in, seamlessly switching between apps and personal data storage servers, without losing any data or social connections.

At the same time as Berners-Lee and his team have been working on technology to defend data privacy, autonomy and portability, we at the Mat|r Project have been working on an open source application development technology (now patented) aimed at democratizing the power to create and shape the digital experience.

We feel that there is an urgent need for developers all over the world to be working on projects like Solid to reclaim the internet as a force for good. We hope to make our own small contribution to this effort by announcing fully integrated support for Solid in the Mat|r platform. This will enable developers, technologists and creators to easily and rapidly create cross-platform Solid apps that will run native on iOS, Android and Web.

Some of the key features of Solid support in Mat|r:

• One click deployment of native solid apps to Android and iOS stores (and soon web apps)
• Solid libraries that can be imported into your app with no configuration in the mat|r IDE
• Solid specific functions in mat|r|script
• Solid error handling in the mat|r IDE
• A Mat|r hosted Solid server (pod provider service) integrated into the Mat|r databoard (with the option to choose other pod providers)

Our goal is that mat|r will make the ability to create Solid apps more accessible to more potential developers, provide the benefits of Solid to all mat|r developers and provide an easy way to extend the benefits of Solid to native mobile apps as well as other connected devices and interface types in the near future.

Our rapid roll out of Solid integration highlights the power of Mat|r as a universal development ecosystem that is able to support an infinite number of platforms, OSs, data architectures and back ends as a service.

We expect to launch the first Solid enabled version of Mat|r by December 2018. Sign up for updates.