Here’s a quick story “from the trenches”.

First a bit of context:

I guess most people here use crypto primarily via desktop wallets (like MetaMask). So you don’t use crypto the way you’d use Cash App or Revolut for everyday payments or 10 small txs per day.

But the truth is that people spend most of their non-work time on mobiles, scrolling YouTube, Instagram, or WhatsApp. So, if we want Ethereum to reach significant consumer adoption, our mobile experiences must be great because this is what people are used to, and troubleshooting stuff on mobile is very irritating. Plus most people in Asia and Africa are mobile-first.

Why do I even talk about it?

So we've been building Kiwi for like 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 is primarily focused 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 Istanbul to LA and saw people getting onboarded to our app. They used Rainbow, Coinbase Wallet, Metamask and many other wallets.

Metamask basically doesn't work most of the time. Rainbow sometimes breaks down, too. Coinbase wallet used to be the best, but now they redirect people to create a passkey wallet, which is confusing.

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 trying to onboard users to your app in these circumstances?

Last year, my co-founder even made a viral thread about testing different mobile wallets, and since then, not a lot has changed: https://x.com/timdaub/status/1673591390687690753

And it’s not that the Ethereum community doesn’t care about the UX. Vitalik even said at 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 the hell is going on with our mobile wallet connections, he'd just ban crypto wallets from AppStore forever.

Wallets are something that needs to work 99.9999% of the time. You can't build consumer crypto apps - and have real adoption - when wallets work 80% of the time. But this is the sad reality that’s making the adoption much harder.

And the reason everyone is so excited about embedded wallets is 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 wallets must be compatible with all of them. But then, how do the desktop wallets work 99.99% of the time?

If we had solved the Merge, I imagine we would have found a way to connect mobile wallets reliably. But it’s been 1.5 years now, and this mobile wallet connectivity problem is still omnipresent.