AskUCP – UCP protocol explorer showing all products on Shopify (https://askucp.com/)
On January 11th, Google and Shopify announced the Universal Commerce Protocol (ucp.dev). It's an open standard that lets any application query products across e-commerce platforms without needing APIs, integrations, or middlemen.
AskUCP is one of the first applications built on it.
Right now, if you want to buy something online, you have to know which store sells it. You go to Amazon, or you go to a Shopify store, or you go to Etsy. Each one has its own search, its own interface, its own checkout. The experience is fragmented because the infrastructure is siloed.
UCP changes this at the protocol level. If products are described in a standard format, any application can discover them. You don't need permission from each platform. You don't need to build integrations. Anybody or any AI agent just querys the protocol.
AskUCP is designed to be a single pane of glass into online commerce. You search once, and you see products from across the ecosystem. Currently, that means the entire Shopify catalog. As more platforms adopt UCP, their products become explorable too. Eventually, it should be everything.
This is a proof of concept. It's early, and there are rough edges. Let me know what you think, refinements, ideas etc etc.
Hi HN, I built this because I got tired of fighting with Safaricom's Daraja API.
If you've ever tried to accept M-Pesa payments in East Africa, you know the pain: XML callbacks, rotating OAuth tokens, undocumented error codes, etc.
M-Pesa processes over $300B annually. It's how 50+ million people in Kenya pay for everything from groceries to rent. But integrating it into your app? That's a different story. Most developers spend weeks on what should take hours.
Micropay is essentially what Stripe did for credit cards, but for mobile money.
That's super cool, especially digging the openship UI! AskUCP started as an experiment as well. Let's see where the world takes us in terms of standards and open/closed/hybrid architectures.
Once we add UCP support to Openfront (our Shopify alternative), would just having a .well-known/ucp be enough to get support on AskUCP? Or would you have to implement some things on your end?
After 10 years in defense tech, watching missile attacks in Ukraine and the Middle East made it clear how little most people really get about air defense. So I'm building this simulator which drops you into the operator’s seat. You can test out different scenarios and build an air defense network against various types of threats (stats from real world). Also have Ukraine, Israel-Iran scenarios.
https://airdefense.dev/
Between resolver.arpa, ipv4only.arpa, and the fact that your email won't be delivered to anywhere you actually care about without in-addr.arpa I'm not sure I'd call it legacy.
Author here. This was a personal project to understand modern air defense that got a bit out of hand. I wanted to see what was possible using only open-source data and a web browser.
Happy to answer any questions about the tech stack or the simulation logic. The campaign mode has some interesting scenarios if you want to give it a try.
On January 11th, Google and Shopify announced the Universal Commerce Protocol (ucp.dev). It's an open standard that lets any application query products across e-commerce platforms without needing APIs, integrations, or middlemen. AskUCP is one of the first applications built on it.
Right now, if you want to buy something online, you have to know which store sells it. You go to Amazon, or you go to a Shopify store, or you go to Etsy. Each one has its own search, its own interface, its own checkout. The experience is fragmented because the infrastructure is siloed.
UCP changes this at the protocol level. If products are described in a standard format, any application can discover them. You don't need permission from each platform. You don't need to build integrations. Anybody or any AI agent just querys the protocol.
AskUCP is designed to be a single pane of glass into online commerce. You search once, and you see products from across the ecosystem. Currently, that means the entire Shopify catalog. As more platforms adopt UCP, their products become explorable too. Eventually, it should be everything.
This is a proof of concept. It's early, and there are rough edges. Let me know what you think, refinements, ideas etc etc.