I have been using Phoenix for a while and didn't have such problems. In fact, I am quite happy with it.

There is something where you are right: since they are charging 1% fee, 3000 sats minimum, they should always open a 300000 sats channel at least.

If you use the Android version, you can disable automatic channel creation.

Lastly, custodial wallets maybe could offer the chance to open a self-custody channel upon reaching a certain balance. That would bring the best of both approaches.

Another person spoiled by the convience of IOUs.

The thing with Phoenix is that you have to start in a smart way (creating a big enough channel and explain why), which is not easy to onboard noobs. Otherwise it works perfectly fine and ACINQ hybrid model is the path to follow IMO. They just need to add little tutorial to avoid people paying 1% cause of lack of liquidity.

As for other non custodial wallets I had bad experience so far with Breez (high fees), OBW (didn't work), Bitkit (1/50 payment goes through), and even Blixt which often fails for unknown reasons (same for one of my friend) even if my channels should allow the payment to go easily) In conclusion I use Zeus+Umbrel with LNC, or Phoenix

So indeed the path toward self custody on lightning is still long and far from being mainstream, but Phoenix if correctly handled from the start, works incredibly well already.

I am OK with your statement. The road to self custody is not easy. You must have done all the steps into learning and understanding how it works. Just jumping straight into self custody without doing your learning, is not the right way and always end up in frustration. Important is the journey, not the end.

As I said in this post: how to choose the right wallet #70725

I use lately Walletano's PWA. It offers both a custodial and a self-custodial wallet. I only tried the custodial one, I might connect my node later. But it's multi wallet, so you can have lots of wallets (custodial and self-custodial together) for different use cases (business or personal).

WoS seems a little faster probably because Walletano is quite new and doesn't have yet too many channels but I like more Walletano's UI.

Plus it was quite easy to setup my LN address the same as my email address.

Will keep you posted as soon as I connect my node.

too easy to lose sats with self custody lightning solutions. profit isn't important to me but losing sats just for normal use is unacceptable.

I'm very new to lightning. I only created a (custodial) wallet a month ago, to sign up for SN. Reading through your post, and the comments confirms my gut feeling that self-custody will not be for everybody.

Interesting. Is it possible that you have a lot of small channels and mostly receive sats?

I don't have this problem

On Phoenix you can disable the open channel in the fly. That's how I use it.

To be fair, LN is a payment network.

I find WoS a brilliant and well-executed application for its purpose: Send and receive payments, minimum fuss, minimum fees.

If the amount you have is more than pocket money, either send it to a self-custodial LN wallet (if you're gonna need it soon), or an on-chain wallet for longer-term storage.

One of the value propositions of Lightning (maybe I misunderstood?) are that there are "no fees". For Lightning to Lightning this is mostly correct, but the cost to set up channels and all that stuff still counts as "fees" in my mind. Might as well give me 3% visa surcharge in that case.

This is not a bad thing, it is just early days that has seen engineering solutions where more UX is needed IMO.

I feel this is a UX problem that will be solved eventually with some kind of technical magic with autobuying cheap liquidity / ELTOO + BIP118 or something.

The issue is that if you want to use Lightning for receiving any kind of regular income you will be constantly opening channels as you run out of liquidity. I don't see how you can currently use Lightning like you would use a bank account where you receive a lot, and spend only a part of that.

The big questions include "What even is a wallet?" and "How can Lightning infrastructure integrate into the paradigm of accounts / saving / checking / income and expenses" that most people are used to for their daily life.

Good. But try to install Simple Bitcoin Wallet or Valet and open one channel to your node. No extra fees besides onchain fees.

If (god forbid) WoS goes down, how much will you cry? Picture the scenario honestly

Update after 1 year:

Since I use LNC and not Tor anymore for Zeus, it works fast and just fine. As this is not over Tor, my node is behind a VPN 24/7 router so that I don't leak my KYC'ed ISP ip address.

I use Aqua wallet as well. I load Aqua wallet on-chain from cold storage with non-KYC sats and swap them to Liquid. From there, I top up my channel and some "tip" wallets I have like Phoenix and WoS which I mostly use as a fallback solution. The Android phone isn't linked to my identity, so this is fine.

It would be nice if WoS publish their apk somewhere else like other wallets do.

I've been doing some research, and I found this resource:

It tests for reproducibility.

Personally I have been using Blixt on my mobile devices.

It's lightning wallet that can be fully hosted directly on android/ios, and the channel backup can be restored to a dedicated LND instance. It takes about 30 seconds longer to sync on startup compared to the custodial lightning stuff, though, so there's a tradeoff. And it can be sideloaded from github. And their telegram channel is really helpful.

LN Newbie question:

What about blue wallet? It has multisig (called vault)

KYC options in terms of lightning support: Strike, cash app, kraken.

No KYC but it is custodial: coinOS.io

I have few channels in Phoenix and no problem receiving. Didnt open new for like 2y, so I think problem is in you. What are their sizes? If they are too small and you want to accept big tx, ofc it wont go in.

Yes, custodial is for noobies, but you seem to operate with higher amounts.

Send 1M to Phoenix, pay with it or send it out, now you have plenty of inbound to accept 500-900k sat transactions.

WoS can send onchain as well, no?

𝐇𝗼𝐰𝐝𝐲 𝐝𝗼 ? 🤠 👋

Good. But try to install Simple Bitcoin Wallet or Valet and open one channel to your node. No extra fees besides onchain fees.

But if you have your own node, why bother with WoS and submarine swaps? This is maybe the thing that deserves some tomatoes. No inbound liquidity? You can buy at amboss for example, quickly checked and saw offers with 0.25% (= 2500 ppm) price. Boltz costs you 0.5%. I though about privacy of both methods, and not sure, it could be better with WoS + Boltz. If you just receive by lightning and then close channels, you sort of reveal to payers which UTXOs are yours. Not exactly, closing channel produces 2 UTXOs and only one of them is yours. With WoS+Boltz, payers have no idea, WoS or Boltz individually know little, useful info is only revelead if they cooperate or are coerced/subpoenated.