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FreeWallet

Latest release: 1.0.9 ( 18th March 2019 ) 🔍 Last analysed 22nd October 2021 .    
3.8 ★★★★★
13 ratings
5th November 2016

As part of our Methodology, we ask:

Can the product be built from the source provided?

 
If the answer is "no", we mark it as "Failed to build from source provided!".

Published code doesn’t help much if the app fails to compile.

We try to compile the published source code using the published build instructions into a binary. If that fails, we might try to work around issues but if we consistently fail to build the app, we give it this verdict and open an issue in the issue tracker of the provider to hopefully verify their app later.

The product cannot be independently verified. If the provider puts your funds at risk on purpose or by accident, you will probably not know about the issue before people start losing money. If the provider is more criminally inclined he might have collected all the backups of all the wallets, ready to be emptied at the press of a button. The product might have a formidable track record but out of distress or change in management turns out to be evil from some point on, with nobody outside ever knowing before it is too late.

But we also ask:

Was the product updated during the last two years?

 
If the answer is "no", we mark it as "Not updated in a long time".

Bitcoin wallets are complex products and Bitcoin is a new, advancing technolgy. Projects that don’t get updated in a long time are probably not well maintained. It is questionable if the provider even has staff at hands that is familiar with the product, should issues arise.

This verdict may not get applied if the provider is active and expresses good reasons for not updating the product.

Help spread awareness for build reproducibility

Please help us spread the word discussing build reproducibility with FreeWallet  via their Twitter!

Do your own research!

Try out searching for "lost bitcoins", "stole my money" or "scammers" together with the wallet's name, even if you think the wallet is generally trustworthy. For all the bigger wallets you will find accusations. Make sure you understand why they were made and if you are comfortable with the provider's reaction.

If you find something we should include, you can create an issue or edit this analysis yourself and create a merge request for your changes.

The Analysis 

Update 2022-01-04: The iOS version of the app is available again. (Twitter Screenshot). The last update however was 2019-03-18.

Update 2021-10-12: This app is not available anymore.

In the description we can read:

Secure
Wallet Passphrase & private keys never leave device

and

FreeWallet is an open source mobile wallet which supports Bitcoin.

so it’s a non-custodial, open source Bitcoin wallet but can we verify the claims?

On their website we find a link to their GitHub and from their to the mobile wallet’s repository. There we find no claims of reproducibility and not even build instructions, so this app is not verifiable.

(lw, dg)