Will you try it?
Smaller is better
Jul 4, 2024
Flowee Pay July release.
We are proud to release the July version of Flowee Pay, the new version has been shipped on Linux (PPA/AUR) and on Android’s Google Play store. It includes some new features, improvements and bugfixes.
The first thing you’ll notice when updating is that the update has shrunk on Android from a 54MB download to be a much smaller 20MB download. This reflects several technology improvements in the wallet while ensuring we still do full simplified payment verification. Below we explain the full idea.
The translations of Flowee Pay into Spanish, German and Polish have seen big improvements.
We worked hard on making the import existing wallet screens work smoother and be easier to understand.
The Linux version has been made compatible with the Wayland based distro’s.
Many small bugfixes and improvements.
Shrinking it down!
This weeks release of Flowee Pay with the much smaller initial download is the result of various months of engineering and shows a change in the userbase’s wishes.
The initial release of Pay on Google had a download of 85MB. The idea was that most people will download new apps on WiFi and therefor nobody will mind a bigger initial download. The majority of the space taken was historical data. The idea was that if you download that once, it’s free to use from then on out.
Our userbase has told us that they want smaller (initial) downloads, they also told us that they really want to keep using SPV because it is the only decentralized and untrusted way to have a wallet. While those two are a hard package to put together, we’ve very happy to have succeeded in this release!
The first big step was in January when we moved the creation of an index to be done at the first run on the phone. This removed a big index file from the download with the cost of starting slightly slower the first time on a new phone.
But we still shipped a 60MB file that holds all the historical block-headers for the Bitcoin Cash chain. We mostly removed that one in this release too!
So, what did we do? Well, we realized that people that download the wallet to just receive don’t need any historical data. You really only need the history of your own wallets. So a new wallet just gets them from the network over time.
People that import an old wallet will need to fetch the old blockheaders data so the wallet can verify the transactions. For this reason we improved the import screens to now automatically fetch the historical headers before we start to import the new wallet. Completely automated.
Using checkpoints all this data is still verified by the wallet and as such we keep being a full SPV wallet. Just now we only get the data that you need, and not more.
The result is a 20MB download from the Google Play store. We have some other ideas on how to make that even less, but for now we’re quite happy.
Download today!
Please give Flowee Pay a try, it is free. We just want you to be a happy user!
Downloads on on the product page.