Install Lichen on a Device

At this time, during our ‘alpha’ development phase, the Lichen client can be installed on Android devices only. Detaile instructions, as well as distributions for iOS and desktops are coming soon. The following story illustrates how we envision that Lichen will be installed on any smartphone.

Getting Lichen to Grow on the Side of Your Tree: Installation and Basic Settings

Liliana opens a reader on her phone and centers the camera on the Lichen QR code. Installation completes in five seconds, and the Lichen welcome screen appears with several configuration options:

• Lichen waits in background
• Activate Lichen manually
• Custom condition activates

When she touches the first option for Lichen to run in the background, a second message appears with another set of options:

“To fetch rules, Lichen requires data from your device, such as its location, to establish what jurisdiction it is being used in. Please choose one of the following three data management options:

• Treat all my data as strictly private and confidential, and not to be used beyond the transaction
• Use my data anonymously towards general Internet of Rules and related service improvements
• Use my data to personalize services for me and towards general Internet of Rules and related service improvements

When she makes a selection, a scrolling alphabetical list of commerce platforms appears, with the instruction: “Select platforms for Lichen to monitor”. First on that list is “Select All, followed by: 3dCart, BigCartel, BigCommerce, Magento, Odoo, Shopify, Volusion, WooCommerce, and Yo!Cart. She chooses “Select All”.

With Lichen now running whilst she’s buying online, as soon as she advances past the electronic shopping cart to a purchase order on any of these platforms, essential data from that purchase order is provided to Lichen, as well as the identity that she authenticated with. She has authorized Lichen to use data from the device itself, such as its location to establish what jurisdictions it’s being used in (trade zone, county, state/province, county, municipality, district), and towards general Internet of Rules and related service improvements.

Lichen uses this data package to search the Internet of Rules. Finding a set of applicable rules, Lichen processes the available data and sends back to the device an immutable data package that includes the original data for comparative validation, the computed results data, and the applied rules and their metadata for her information and verification.