# Mac's Ethereum mobile wallets rant

Source: https://x.com/MacBudkowski/status/1859256759405486282

## Summary

The author, from the team behind Kiwi, argues that Ethereum will not reach real adoption until mobile wallet connections are fixed, and that Passkeys and Account Abstraction will not solve the problem. Kiwi, a PWA app for reading and discussing Ethereum content, has avoided embedded wallets to stay open and Ethereum-aligned. The author describes watching conference users struggle to connect wallets, including a Berlin user who spent 10 minutes trying three wallets. The post says MetaMask often fails on mobile, while Rainbow and Coinbase Wallet break intermittently, and that embedded wallets are not a full solution because they lock the dapp to a vendor. The author says the root cause is unknown and suggests investigating it.

## Article

Ethereum won't reach real adoption until we solve the mobile wallets problem. And no, Passkeys and Account Abstraction won’t solve it because the problem is in mobile wallets’ breaking connections.

Here’s a short story:

We've been building Kiwi for about 1.5 yrs. Our idea has been to stay open and Ethereum-aligned.

This means that we haven’t set up “Sign in with Google” or embedded wallets powered by Privy, Capsule, and others. We haven’t even built an Android or Apple app - we have a PWA app so that everyone can use it.

Since our app primarily focuses on people reading and discussing Ethereum-related content, the mobile experience is very important for us. But unfortunately, mobile wallets just don’t work.

I've been flying around the world to attend conferences - from Bangkok to LA - and saw people getting onboarded to our app. Some use iPhones; some use Android, and this is how it looks:

Metamask basically doesn't work on mobile most of the time, but even ones like Rainbow and Coinbase Wallet break from time to time. People click “Connect Wallet”, scan the WalletConnect QR code, and nothing happens. Notification just gets lost in the ether.

This year in Berlin, I watched a user spend 10 minutes trying to connect 3 different wallets to our app, only to shrug and say, ‘I’ll try later.’ It’s as if you made your product demo, and the Internet broke during the call - incredibly frustrating.

And it’s not only Kiwi - many users have similar problems on established apps like Zora. Some just say: “Ah yeah, it’s normal. I will figure it out once I get in front of my laptop”. Can you imagine the 2011 Uber team trying to onboard users to their app in these circumstances?

I think we don’t speak about it because we are too entrenched in this “MetaMask on desktop boomer” POV as browser extension wallets work flawlessly. But Gen Z doesn’t use as much desktop as we do - they’re mobile first. So is Africa and Asia.

And even us, 30+ yr olds spend most of our non-work time on mobiles, scrolling YouTube, Twitter, or WhatsApp. So, if we want Ethereum to reach significant consumer adoption, our mobile experiences must be great. This is what people are used to.

A mobile wallet should be as reliable like a light switch—instant and dependable 99.99% of the time, not 80% of the time, like some beta software.

Last year, my co-founder even made a semi-viral thread about testing different mobile wallets (QT'd), and since then, not a lot has changed.

And it’s not that the Ethereum community doesn’t care about the UX.

Vitalik even said in one of his talks: 
“We should be as decentralized and open as Linux and Android, and at the same time have as consistent a user experience as Apple”. 

But if Steve Jobs were still alive and saw what is going on with our mobile wallet connections, he'd just ban crypto wallets from AppStore, and he’d be right.

And yes, there are workarounds.

Celo built Minipay inside the Opera browser, and it works well. And yes, you can open the page in your wallet's browser, and then it works, but do we really want to bet on users learning another new routine?

There are also embedded wallets, of course. And I think people got so excited about them because they go around these obvious bugs. 

But it's not a solution either because the dapp gets the vendor locked in, and the user has to create and send money to a new wallet without his identity and onchain history. And the whole idea is to have your ENS and onchain history in one place, in your hot wallet.

The question is, why does it keep happening? 

Maybe because it's just complex - people use different browsers - from Firefox, through Chrome up to Opera - and different phones and wallets must be compatible with all of them. And I assume that desktop browser extensions can be more tightly integrated than mobile wallets. 

Maybe the problem is with WalletConnect? Or maybe with lack of standardization and that's why some wallets work better than others? 

I don’t know the root cause here, but since it's so bad for the overall UX and adoption, maybe we should focus more on investigating that.

If we had solved the Merge, I imagine we can find a way to reliably connect mobile wallets.

## Comments

**mishaderidder.eth**: Yes, mobile wallets can be a pain for sure. Personally iPhone + Orion PWA + Zerion wallet always works fast and seamlessly. (Just re-tested) But I know experiences can differ, and that is of course the point. Btw VPN can also sometimes be a factor complicating things.

**@macbudkowski**: Seems like iOS works much better than Android in general. But if Zerion always works there is hope that this is solvable on the wallet level :) BTW what's Orion?