Mist

Let us start with the mist browser, which will be easiest to understand. This is the user-facing layer of the Ethereum platform. If you are a smartphone user and have used Android or iOS phones, you can think of a mist browser as the web 3.0 equivalent of Google Play Store or Apple App Store. Mist is the tool of choice to browse and use decentralized applications.

The tricky part is that, as of today, this browser has no stable release available for mobile phones.

It is worth mentioning that P-ACS, a team of Java developers, released an unstable version of an Android compatible Ethereum API app for developers (https://goo.gl/ANSRv4) in October 2016. So, technically, this team made a web 3.0 app browser available via a web 2.0 Play Store. Backward compatibility rocks! Don't you think? Figure 2.5 illustrates the browser analogy for clarity.

However, the desktop version is quite stable and is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. We will study its installation in Chapter 3, Hello World of Ethereum Smart Contract: