Crypto wallet provider Breez has announced an initial version of its Lightning payments app for iPhones.
Noncustodial crypto wallet Breez has launched a beta version of its Lightning payments app for the iPhone, which runs on a Neutrino-based client.
The iOS version is available for testing on Apple’s publishing platform for beta apps, TestFlight, per a Medium post from Breez CEO Roy Sheinfeld.
Sheinfeld claims that the Breez app could be a pivotal step in establishing a Lightning economy. He notes that the open beta for the Android version of the app gained “hundreds of new” users within 60 days.
Considering the success of its Android rollout, Breez wants a piece of the iOS market too, which it believes could help the company reach a critical mass of mobile users worldwide.
“Together, Android and iOS cover 98.01 of the mobile market. With our new beta client for the iPhone, that 98.01 is our new goal. It’s a giant leap towards realizing the Lightning economy,” Sheinfeld writes.
When a user fires up the app, a payment channel to the Breez hub is created, allowing users or nodes connected to the hub to send Lightning payments to one another. For every transaction made, the transacting parties will sign an updated balance sheet to reflect the changes in the bitcoin stored in the wallet. When the transaction is complete, the channel closes and the final balances are registered on the blockchain.
The features on the iOS version are similar to the ones present on the Android client. Users can create Lightning invoices, conduct Submarine Swaps to add funds and run a background channels watcher.
One noticeable difference between the Android client and the newly released iOS version is in the behavior of the background watcher. If a user force quits the Breez app, the background watcher may sleep for a while. Breez has a simple fix for this: If the background watcher sleeps beyond 72 hours, the user will receive an automatic notification to wake it up.