Mycelium review

Mycelium is a capable Android bitcoin wallet with an unusually long track record and a weak iPhone story, so choose it for an Android phone and look elsewhere on iOS. WalletScrutiny dates the Android release to July 1, 2013, which makes it one of the longest continuously shipping mobile bitcoin wallets in existence, and the team behind it goes back further still: Mycelium started in 2008 building mesh networking hardware, before bitcoin had a wallet worth naming.

It is self-custodial and unusually complete for a phone. You get HD spending accounts alongside single-address savings accounts, native and wrapped SegWit, a full view of your unspent outputs, fee bumping through child pays for parent, connection to your own Bitcoin node, optional Tor, watch-only accounts, spending straight from paper wallets, and hardware wallet support for Trezor, Ledger and KeepKey. Third-party services can each be switched off individually. It is no longer bitcoin only: the app also carries Ethereum and ERC-20 accounts alongside the bitcoin ones.

On verification, read the claims carefully, because the vendor and the auditor do not say quite the same thing. Mycelium's own site says the app is reproducible and links WalletScrutiny as the proof. WalletScrutiny passes Mycelium on all seven of its wallet tests, including that the product is the original rather than a lookalike, that the source is public and that the binary is not obfuscated. On the iPhone side it calls the app source available and adds a blunt caveat: nobody has reproduced an iOS build, so the provider's claim that keys never leave your device cannot be checked there. WalletScrutiny also discloses that its own authors have contributed to Mycelium, which is worth factoring into how you read the verdict. The gap shows in the version numbers too, with WalletScrutiny listing 3.22.0.2 for Android against 2.10 for iPhone, and the iOS source repository on GitHub is archived with no commits since June 2024.

Mycelium publishes no country policy and does not need one: you install from Google Play or download the APK straight from the project, with an Obtainium link and a published signing certificate for people who avoid app stores. It also warns, in its own words, that every social media account claiming to represent Mycelium belongs to scammers. For a wallet this old and this widely imitated, take that seriously: install from wallet.mycelium.com or the store listing that page links, and from nowhere else.