One of the common criticisms of Urbit is that there is nothing to do on it. This is not surprising. Finding apps on Urbit takes a lot of work. Urbit lacks a centralized appstore where users can go to find apps. Instead, apps come from Urbit ships and are downloaded and installed P2P on the Urbit instance. Sometimes, different apps created by the same developer will be hosted on different Urbit instances. This makes app discovery difficult — and a huge potential win for the team that solves it.

Urbit has a growing group of developers constantly shipping apps to populate their protocols. Some particularly useful apps are %campfire, P2P video calls, and %escape, a new group manager. Urbit is a growing ecosystem. Every day, new apps are emerging that make these instances more practical. I recommend getting an instance up and running and checking out some apps.

Here is a very short list to get you started: