good article, it got me thinking!

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it's a bit of chicken and egg problem. users won't use lightning without "apps with lightning". but app developers won't integrate lightning into their apps unless it's something users want. so the utility has to be clear to users, and the ux has to be better than fiat. that brings me to my next point...

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what's the onboarding story for an app that integrates breez sdk? do users of the app already need a lightning wallet? and/or will the users need to create a new wallet, back up a seed phrase, figure out how to buy bitcoin and transfer it into the app (which may involve a whole other separate user journey), etc? imo onboarding and key management are critical to get right to cross the chasm from highly motivated ideological bitcoiners to "mainstream" users who have a Job To Be Done and bitcoin/lightning just happens to be the best tool for the job. if the ux is subpar compared to fiat, developers are just going to go with fiat.

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I think the developer-first approach is directionally correct. of course it's important to have wallet software, but once we have that, the next important step is distribution. and using third-party applications as the distribution channel makes a lot of sense. paypal became successful because of its integrations with applications (crucially, ebay to start). I think bitcoin/LN for payments will succeed similarly. at a high level there are two paths you could take here: integrating with existing applications (which involves BD/marketing to existing merchants and product dev teams) and integrating with new applications (which involves capturing mindshare of product teams/devs who are at the beginning of their product building journey). since your article seems to be mostly about the latter I'll focus here.

It may be instructive to see how other developer-oriented technologies that we see everywhere took root. take google analytics for example. as an anti-privacy tool, I don't like it, but it is everywhere so it's at least worth thinking about how they were able to achieve that scale and take some lessons from that. part of it was partnerships with website building companies. "hey website builder, your clients want to track their website performance? use google analytics". part of it was partnerships with online marketing classes. "hey marketer, want to track your impressions and clicks? use google analytics" ... which led the marketers to either plug it into the stack themselves or ask a dev on their team to do it for them. part of it was developer training. "ok and on step 3 of How To Build Your First App we're going to add in some analytics so we can track user metrics, let's integrate google analytics." these distribution channels got GA in front of many many people for whom GA solved a problem, and successful conversions through those channels over many years compounded to the point where GA is now nearly ubiquitous.

with a similar strategy of getting bitcoin/LN in front of many developers (or entrepreneurs) who need a payment solution, maybe we can get bitcoin/LN payments to be a ubiquitous part of the payments stack. and maybe we don't even need the application to use bitcoin/LN exclusively for payments, maybe bitcoin/LN is just one option alongside fiat (stripe, square, paypal, where you at?). but bitcoin/LN is the option that should be promoted to users for whom bitcoin/LN uniquely solves a problem, whether that's no KYC (depending on the onramp used), or privacy (ish), or micropayments, or no chargebacks, or censorship-resistance, or global accessibility, etc.