Now Released: Mobile Application of Bitcoin Lightning Network For Users’ Testing

According to the latest reports, Lightning Labs has announced the release of a dedicated mobile application on 19^th June 2019. The Lightning App, as the application is referred to, is available for the users to download on Testflight (iOS) as well as Google Play (Android). The App runs on Bitcoin Mainnet in alpha. The crypto community was updated about the development through Twitter on the same day. A detailed blog post also followed later to offer insights about the app and its functionalities.

We've released the mainnet alpha of our Lightning Mobile App for iOS & Android, the first on all major platforms! ⚡️📲

Send money instantly around the world. Control your own funds and data with Neutrino and Autopilot. Read more and try it out here: https://t.co/d9V6P2dkzf pic.twitter.com/OnGNI8qik6

— Lightning Labs⚡️🌐 (@lightning) June 19, 2019

The App will allow users to send money anywhere in the world instantaneously while enjoying complete control over their funds and personal data. The App is the 1^st mainnet application to be available on all the leading platforms, both desktop and mobile. Prior to this, the entity released the desktop version of the App on 23^rd April 2019 and now that the mobile version has been launched, the application is available on macOS, Linux, and Windows too apart from Android and iOS.

For those who came in late, Lightning Labs is a research organization that works on the design and development of the payment channels using Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. The mobile app demonstrates a simple UI so that it is easier for all the users to navigate.

Moreover, it is built utilizing the same two technologies as its desktop counterpart, namely – Autopilot and Neutrino. While the first connects users to the trusted routing nodes, the latter is a light client specification which enables Lightning wallets of non-custodial nature to verify BTC transactions with minimized trust and enhanced privacy without having to fully sync the Bitcoin blockchain. That means all a user has to do is download and validate block headers and filter worth 10s of megabytes in merely a few minutes.

Additionally, the mobile app completely integrates Lightning Network node utilizing the network’s own LND, similar to the desktop application. As far as security is concerned, the mobile app leverages advanced platforms along with the hardware features to provide utmost security to the users’ funds. As the blog states, the private key of the wallet never goes out of the user’s device but stays within in an encrypted form.

However, with all this information, the announcement also asked users not to load their wallets with too many funds as it is still an initial testing phase and a lot more work needs to be done. For starters, users should fund their wallets with not more than 5-20 USD of Bitcoin for testing.