Here's my attempt: if a smartphone is a thing that's designed to facilitate the development of secure, robust, powerful client-side software, Urbit is the serve

Here's my attempt: if a smartphone is a thing that's designed to facilitate the development of secure, robust, powerful client-side software, Urbit is the server-side equivalent. It is (or, aspires to be) the thing in which you can write the server side of a client/server application, and have it be as easy to use as an ios app. To see what I mean, imagine trying to do a simple client/server use case, e.g. 'I want to share this picture with Grandma', for urbit users. It would be pretty trivial - all of the hard parts (e.g. determining whether the person requesting the file is the person I intended to share it with) are handled by Urbit, in the same way that a smartphone handles screen orientation and touch events for the client software. So, the vision is that the sort of people who currently have a cloud vm or a linux box in their basement to host a website/email server/game server/etc, would run those things inside urbit to take advantage of its security (it aspires to be literally uncrackable) and builtin functionality (auth, exactly-once messaging, etc). Obviously, the main problem is that AFAIK none of those apps have been written yet...