mobile app which stores wallet locally

From what I understand, both the CoinBase and BlockChain iOS apps store your wallet on their servers. There doesn't seem to be any iOS app (or perhaps Android either) which stores your wallet locally on the mobile device.

I understand why it may be impractical to download and store the multi-GB blockchain locally on the device but the wallet is usually very small. I understand that by storing the wallet locally you risk losing your coins if your phone is lost or stolen but that could be mitigated by offering features to encrypt your wallet with a passphrase and also back it up over USB to your computer (or choose to assume the risk of loss).

Is there some technical reason why a mobile app can't be developed that stores the wallet locally (and obviously does not transmit it to the server) but stores the blockchain on the server?

RentFree

Posted 2013-04-30T11:44:04.093

Reputation: 2 391

Answers

Bitcoin Wallet

Electrum

BitcoinSpinner

All of the above mentioned store the wallet file locally on your phone

rdymac

Posted 2013-04-30T11:44:04.093

Reputation: 1 357

Technically there is no reason you can't have a wallet on an iOS device, but it appears (according to this article) that Apple isn't allowing Bitcoin wallets into the App Store.

David Ogren

Posted 2013-04-30T11:44:04.093

Reputation: 2 982

I don't think so. As long as the blockchain is safely elsewhere, a client like Electrum (which locally stores the wallet and uses a seed, but trusts an external server for the blockchain) should work.

Note that there may be issues in joining a local P2P network since mobile networks don't work that way. However, there should be nothing preventing a mobile device from joining a node on the larger network (For example one of these).

I guess that nobody has really seen a market here, that's all.

Manishearth

Posted 2013-04-30T11:44:04.093

Reputation: 639