Current non-custodial lightning wallets for Android? \ stacker news ~bitcoin

I'm looking for best LN wallets for Android. By "best" I mean:

should be strictly non-custodial
should connect to my own node
shouldn't expose the entire node amount as spendable

These requirements leave only a few options: Simple Bitcoin Wallet (seems to be abandoned due to the war in Ukraine), Breez, BlueWallet, Electrum and Blixt.

So far SBW was my primary wallet but it has a few inconvenient bugs and looks like they will never be fixed, the developer said he's no longer interested in Bitcoin and LN. Which is sad by itself. SBW is closest to ideal for me, very fast, handles both on-chain and LN, supports LNURL etc.

Breez is incredibly slow, it runs lnd 0.12 internally. Payments take longer and longer the more you pay, it went from under 5 seconds on a fresh setup to about half a minute. Far from the speed of light tbh. Could be better on iOS, idk.

BlueWallet struggles with Tor (UI freezes completely), not the wallet's fault but the Tor dependency. Still not fixed + Tor can't be configured or set to use ORBot (which can be configured with bridges and other settings). So if Tor doesn't connect because it's being actively blocked by your ISP it just doesn't work. Applies to SBW too! Connects to the node via LndHub which is a nice compromise, you don't need to open channels at all but the wallet still uses your node for everything. And you have an internal account that can't spend more than it received. Also this account can be connected to Alby on desktop and you see all your transactions and balance.

Electrum for Android is very ugly but seem to work. Doesn't support LNURL. The UI is more desktop-like than mobile-like. Still, on desktop it's really good overall and the mobile version shares most of the code.

Blixt... I'll try it again. Last time I did it stopped connecting to my node so I had to force close the channel, then the balance was zero but there were two on-chain transactions in the history. I eventually recovered it: typed the seed phrase in BlueWallet and then transferred out. It wasn't much fun. Most probably it's the lnd's fault, not the wallet's. Let's see if updates helped with it. Nothing to say for now but it seems to be pretty advanced and supports most LNURL features which is nice. Would be great if it was also available from F-Droid.

Wallets that don't pass: All custodial wallets like WalletOfSatoshi

Zap/Zeus act as a remote for the node so they show your full balance. Can't be used if your node works as a routing one with significant balance, it's simply reckless.

Eclair was killed.

Phoenix can't use my own node.

Muun doesn't open channels at all and instead uses REST API for LN payments (using their node) and keeps your on-chain balance in sync (they don't explain how it all works internally).

Anything else worth checking out?

10 sats \ 2 replies \ @nullama 9 Sep 2022

I think you already covered all the best lightning wallets out there.

I would continue using Blixt as it has support for a lot of state-of-the-art features and the dev is really responsive. You could try contacting him. Blixt is a great wallet. You can get it from the git releases

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @rkfg OP 9 Sep 2022 freebie

Oh, and also thank you for that link, I didn't know SBW was forked by fiatjaf. Not many Scala enthusiats out there, hopefully he'll keep improving it. The store pages are not yet set up but there's some progress in the commits.

Thanks for replying! It's a bit concerning that there are only these few wallets that truly let me use LN as it should be. And out of them Blixt really looks like the best shot. Sadly, the repo doesn't have a lot of activity. On the other hand, maybe there's not much left to fix? Oh, and also it's written in React Native which is much better than SBW's Scala in terms of the developer audience. Chances of survival are higher for projects that adopt mainstream languages and frameworks even if they're less "cool".