It is a decent experience. Their current solution may not be viable forever though. They may well be pressured to become even more custodial or be forced to facilitate more customers through their own node setup. I hope it's the latter

blocktock

Yes but these shouldn’t be chosen out of necessity, but rather out of convenience

davidw

Or you can use Pheonix or Breez. It's not perfect but it's still far more convenient than what you described.

snakedye

bitcoin

Custodial Lightning is Great 

notgeld

Non-custodial channel liquidity needs to be a priority for Lightning businesses & entrepreneurs.

It’s such a crappy experience, downloading the chain, installing the lightning app and attempting your first payment, withdrawal or even channel open and still not finding a route to your node.

Until then, custodial lightning offers the convenient workaround