The beta release is intended for use by developers who want to explore the features of Self. We're going to follow it up quickly with a full production release, which will extend the features here and resolve the list of issues which are below.
As this is our first beta release there will be issues, Self is incredibly detailed under the hood, so please bear with us as we resolve them. It's just a fact of software that the first users have an uncanny ability to unearth issues which builders who have been at the coalface for some time just don't see.
We're incredibly open to feedback, and available either on our discord or in our customer Slack channel for feedback and assistance.
Features in this beta
This release lets you integrate several key bits of functionality into your apps, the easiest way of explaining it is to have a look at the example apps we have built, each section in those represents a distinct working block of Self code you can integrate into your service.
The example code sits in this repo and references the examples directly from the documentation. You can download the repo, see the full source code for the examples and build and run the examples if you want to.
The features in this release are:
- Authentication and/or Authorisation: biometrically gated verification that the human trying to perform a task [login, transact etc..]
- is the correct human.
- holds a relevant credential.
- Optionally: if the User has a verified identity, the task can be specifically referenced to the identity.
- All of these steps can be done without the user sharing any identifying material.
- Identity Verification: You can embed an Identity verification flow into your mobile app. This flow can import several thousand document types and it is able to read the NFC on passports. Identity material is only stored on the user's device and cannot be shared without their Authorisation, it also cannot be used for commercial purposes.
- This gives you real-time biometrically gated identity verification capability and document verification ability. This is currently suitable for most unregulated use cases.
- Once complete every action can have the equivalent value of an in person document check.
- Digital Signatures: You can enable a user to sign any thing or action digitally using their SelfID keys. This action will be gated using biometrics and can be tied to verified documents. Examples of this include signing contracts, converting message exchanges inside Self into commitments (e.g. an employer offering part time workers shifts by message, convert into a contract signed by both parties on agreement.) receiving goods etc.
- Messaging: Although we are not marketing this feature, you will see from your self app that it is possible to message users in Self using biometrically gated messaging which is encrypted end to end. This prevents anonymous messaging between users and allows extended value from message infrastructure, for example: being able to know that a specific recipient has read a message, ensuring a message has not been intercepted in transit and is being read by the correct recipient and so on.
Beta release limitations
This beta release has some deliberate limitations which you should be aware of:
- This release only allows users to build and test in the Self Sandbox environment. Anything built in Sandbox using this release will be able to be promoted to production in a later release.
- There are no paid options with this release.
- You cannot release a production workload currently, that will be enabled in the next release.
- For simplicity The Sandbox release uses a version of our liveness capture which works the same on both Android and iOS versions. The production release will use platform and device specific liveness checks to minimise friction and maximise reliability.
- As it is only supporting Sandbox workloads the Self Admin app has a limited feature set. It will need upgrading along with the next production release of the Self Platform.
- The embedded UX/UI is not yet fully customisable. the upcoming production release will allow you to either use your own UI or use a customisable UI which will allow you to adapt flow, colours and fonts.
- Self accounts in Sandbox are not reusable.
- Self backup does not backup Sandbox. This is a feature and will not be changed in future releases.
