Show HN: Mu – A Micro App Platform | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Mu – A Micro App Platform

mu.app

73 pointsasim24 comments

Hey all

Sharing a new piece of work I've been doing with a friend. Mu is a new micro web app platform which enables building and sharing apps instantly with storage, auth and payments built in. Apps are single file, built in the browser and rendered as an iframe. They're "micro" because they're quite literally tiny single purpose utilities like a hackernews reader or old school guest book. It's mostly at this point something that scratches a personal itch. Making app development super simple and lightweight. Sort of like living GitHub gists. And trying to build a simpler, cleaner place to consume the web. Right now nothing more than a cool hack I'm sharing. Feedback obviously welcome.

Cheers Asim

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So kind of like https://glitch.com/ and https://inbrowser.app/ but somehow productized, has a bitcoin donation button, and uses iframes(??). Feels pretty slow too, but that might just be the HN hug of death.

The HN hug of death definitely playing a part in that but also the app is just not optimised yet for performance. Unfortunately modern frameworks are absolutely terrible.

Interesting model...

Basically a single standard HTML+CSS+JS web page, hosted remotely.

With the added ability to do User Authentication, Database Storage and Crypto Payments when hosted remotely, via custom API...

Observation: That set of functionality could also be provided via JavaScript library or libraries -- without the requirement for the custom hosting...

If so, then that/those library/libraries -- would still require those web services as endpoints...

In other words, those libraries could still rely on the site "mu.app" for providing those services...

Thus, the author could give away those libraries -- yet still sell those endpoint services -- sort of a SaaS model if you will...

Anyway, just thinking aloud... <g>

Looks cool -- and there should be many paths towards monetization, if that is desired!

“We have built in payments!”

The payments: Bitcoin.

- Mom, can I have payments?

- We have payments at home

Bitcoin payments can be non trivial if done via Lightning network (liquidity management is not easy). I can imagine mu.app being a LN payment processor.

My point was not that they are easy, but rather that they are not what people expect when a service claims to do payments.

This is good feedback, I'll look at adding Stripe integration as well as BTC.

Definitely, and rugpulling "payments" with "only crypto btw" also sets up a huge red flag. Most people are heavily fatigued on weird blockchain projects and looking for any excuse to nope out of this and use a more familiar definitely-not-blockchain competitor. I was wondering if this was a supabase competitor (in the loose sense).

Depends on the people

I see a big potential for unbanked people wanting to make a simple website to perhaps sell their products

We now have a feedback app if anyone wants to leave us feedback on Mu itself.

https://mu.app/feedback

We've also started to aggressively cache some API calls and working on more performance and stability.

Additionally we're discovering some nifty hacks like creating your own profile page as an app. Here's mine https://mu.app/asim

What would be the use case for something like this?

I’m trying to use the Community Chat app, send button doesn’t work. I’ll try later, seems interesting.

Hey, thanks a million for the feedback. I'm the creator of that app and have just fixed this issue. Just to check were you logged in when you tried, as it should have alerted you?

Also on producthunt now if anyone uses that https://www.producthunt.com/products/mu

Did we hug the micro app to death?

Looks like it :(

Does this support local development?

Not yet, but this is something I have considered and could open up.

Definitively a deal breaker considering that there are no way to test the site. A test/sandbox environment could be a good first step

You're able to build and test your site within the app before you publish. But after that all pushes are live. Creating a sandbox / branching system is something that can definately be added.

Not the same thing, but another "single file app" platform in the space that looks interesting is https://val.town. Could be used as a backend for Mu apps

I thought of val town too when looking at this. Not that it's similar in any one way, but I've never been able to deploy small scripts / micro apps faster than with Val Town

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