Flowee Pay is moving on to Android!

When Flowee Pay was first started, already 2 years ago, the dream was not a small one. A truly cross-platform payment solution and wallet. The idea was born out of the frustration that so often wallets only function because of some beefy server doing all the hard work. Those wallets then solve the problem of multiple operating systems and usages by simply not shipping the hard parts in the wallet. But that always comes at a cost, a cost we became tired of paying.

Flowee Pay is a cross-platform wallet, which connects directly to the peer-to-peer full nodes. It is the only wallet on Bitcoin Cash that does not require some servers in the cloud which can leak your data. Flowee Pay doesn’t depend on any 3rd party to keep generously providing some special service. Flowee Pay does not assume such servers will always be out of reach of government oversight.

For 2 years the application has run just fine on Linux desktops, Flowee Pay ships a great desktop app with plenty of features. And now we have a first (barely) usable release on Android!

The secret to making good cross-platform applications is in the separation of the user interface and the rest. The “rest” is identical between desktop and mobile versions while the user interface is unique and specifically tweaked for that platform and form-factor.

Since the work on the Android application started, a month ago, the work has thus been to create a new user interface specifically designed for the mobile form-factor. At this point we have the basic set of features that make a wallet added in this mobile user interface. You can send and receive funds. Watch your transaction history and more. While the desktop application is far more rich in featureset, the user interface does not yet support many of them. Work is ongoing! And if you want to help, it will only go faster.

A special note about some of the hard parts

Some issues unique to Android cropped up while doing the work. Most of the small stuff made the desktop client also more robust, but for instance camera support is not used on your desktop. To scan your QR we needed to add camera support.

The Qt libraries, which we use for the toolkit, are mostly excellent. The Qt-multimedia library for Android support has been a little less so. As such I spent about one and a half weeks just trying to get a consistent and working camera support. The result now works on the various phones I have been collecting to test. But your mileage may differ. Please let me know your experience on Telegram or on Twitter.

There is a APK ready for download on our Flowee Pay products page. Please note that you need to deinstall the first test version before installing the new one.

Frequent releases, and thanks fly to our beta-testers!

As Flowee Pay for mobile grows in featureset every week, we’ll try to do regular releases and show progress in that way. People can say what works and doesn’t work for them and we can together build the best mobile payment solution for Bitcoin Cash.

Thank you and have fun out there!