I thought this was supposed to be live months ago?

I believe it would be better served with a more lean, hungry team that can be compensated by finding product market fit and adoption, rather than a team where the ownership and ultimate success is unclear (e.g. split between Parity employees, Novasama employees, PCF, other contractors, etc.). Ideally the team can unlock more funding via equity or metrics achieved rather than just being paid a consulting rate (or salary at Parity). Additionally, it would be good to understand how the rates in this proposal differ from what the W3F was using for funding (if at all different)

We do see the value of having a Polkadot app. We are a bit unsure of the costs / go to market strategy for it.

This proposal is far too expensive for an onboarding app with unclear ownership and slow delivery. Instead of building another wallet-heavy experience, why not leverage Web3Auth or zkLogin authentication primitives that enable seamless sign-in with Google or FB accounts via OAuth, creating a non-custodial wallet? Sometimes, the solution must meet the needs of its potential users, whether Web3 or Web2 users. Giving users at least a chance for a solution without requiring to manage seed phrases. On a positive note, Raise integration is a promising step. But for now it's a Nay.

I share the same comments as the other DAO members. In addition, I also share the disappointment of not seeing this product already available months ago.

It's a pity this app has disappointed the community. Not sure about it will be a success. Why not integrate its features to current wallets?

Even though I highly support this initiative, I find the price tag too high, after 1 year of development I expected this to be ready. Wonder if opening the source code or giving access to the source code will make some community and peeps from the fellowship pick up that project, wasnt this open source? I'll abstain until my my feedback has been taken into account...

The current ~$1M proposal for six months of Polkadot App development raises major concerns around inflated costs, weak execution, and a lack of accountability. The app remains in poor shape despite being announced by Birdo in September 2023. Over a year and half later, it still features an outdated design, confusing onboarding, and unresolved UX issues. Promises after promises going unmet, the community is losing hope around this project fast. There is also no transparency around how the app will assign staking pools to users. A fair, decentralized, and criteria-based pool selection mechanism must be clearly defined and auditable. This is a serious risk, as the implementing team could place all newcomers that tap "earn" into their own pools without consent (the plan as they described today), with a handful of people at PCF choosing who benefits and who is excluded. Without guardrails, new people could also be put into poorly performing pools without warning, harming their first experience with Polkadot. Since it currently takes ~28 days to unbond from a staking pool, this could be a very poor experience for new users to go through if not handled correctly. Further, given the chosen dev team is the people behind Nova Wallet (a competing app), the conflicts of interest are hard to ignore. One could easily argue they are incentivized to keep the app feature set super limited/lackluster as to not divert users away from their own app, which would be a shame given how much money they are looking to raise from the Polkadot treasury. The proposed dev compensation is also much higher than avg and more than what most infra. devs earn working on the future of Polkadot atm. With all that said, this proposal should be rejected and the project opened back up as a transparent RFP process. A lower budget version of the same team and plan is not a sufficient solution. The community deserves a mobile app led by qualified builders, selected through an open and competitive process.

Fan of Birdo and the team, but the proposal needs a bit of tweaking to get an aye from us. Specifically, we'd like to see the app fully launched in some form. A perfect product is one that has come to market too late.

I personally would like to see the fruits of the work and resources invested into this endeavor so far. Birdo and Parity have both announced that the app was sent to the App/Play Store, but it's too early for further funding, especially at this price tag, before due evaluation. I'm looking forward to the release of the app.