Update 2022-11-02: The repository has not been updated in a long time and the provider has not reacted to our enquiry to do so. This product is not verifiable.

Update 2022-04-07: This product’s provider appears to be partnering with Coinbase and with their latest update they now encourage and help their users to migrate to Coinbase Wallet, a browser extension based self-custodial wallet. The article is not (yet) talking about BRD Bitcoin Wallet Bitcoin BTC being in sunset mode or obsolete but some consolidation appears to be going on.

Update 2021-06-29: The provider informed us that the latest code can be found in a new repository. Apparently the new repository is a fork of the old repository where they changed the license from open source to some look-dont-touch license. For us, both provide the same degree of transparency so we have to revert the last change in verdict. This app does indeed share up to date source code although the git tag and the Play Store version name do differ.

Update 2021-06-27: As pointed out here, the provider stopped updating the public source repository and thus is to be considered closed source. The current version on the Play Store is 4.10.0 from yesterday. The latest version available on their GitHub is 4.9.1.1 from 2021-03-03.

This wallet claims not to be custodial and we found its supposed source code but we found no claim of verifiability and so verification was difficult.

Update: The team reacted quickly to our reach-out after our first analysis via this issue on their GitHub.

Now we find a tag build-3.14.3.3 and can try to compile that:

$ git tag | grep 3.14.3
build-3.14.3.3
$ git checkout build-3.14.3.3
...
HEAD is now at a332b4d5 Merge branch 'pablobu/DROID-1497' into 'release/3.14.3'
$ git submodule update --init --recursive
$ docker run -v $PWD:/mnt -it beevelop/cordova bash
root@e34a31867b99:/tmp# cd /mnt/
root@e34a31867b99:/mnt# yes | $ANDROID_HOME/tools/bin/sdkmanager "platforms;android-28"
root@e34a31867b99:/mnt# ./gradlew :app:assemble
root@e34a31867b99:/mnt# ls app/build/outputs/apk/brd/release/*.apk
brd-release-3.14.2.1.apk  output.json

Now that doesn’t look promising, given we need version 3.14.3 and indeed the diff is huge and goes across many code files.

The content of AboutActivity for example confirms its the wrong version. Many of the differences look harmless like this:

diff -r fromBuild/smali/com/breadwallet/presenter/activities/settings/AboutActivity.smali fromPlayStore/smali/com/breadwallet/presenter/activities/settings/AboutActivity.smali
157c157
<     const-string v4, "3.14.2"
---
>     const-string v4, "3.14.3"

But with these diffs we can’t give it a pass:

Binary files fromBuild/lib/arm64-v8a/libcore.so and fromPlayStore/lib/arm64-v8a/libcore.so differ
Binary files fromBuild/lib/armeabi-v7a/libcore.so and fromPlayStore/lib/armeabi-v7a/libcore.so differ
Binary files fromBuild/lib/x86/libcore.so and fromPlayStore/lib/x86/libcore.so differ
Binary files fromBuild/lib/x86_64/libcore.so and fromPlayStore/lib/x86_64/libcore.so differ

Diffoscope yields user directories in its 397662 lines of diff:

│ ├── readelf --wide --decompress --hex-dump=.rodata {}
│ │ @@ -1,7610 +1,7450 @@
│ │  
│ │  Hex dump of section '.rodata':
│ │ -  0x001622e0 2f557365 72732f61 6a762f64 6576656c /Users/ajv/devel
│ │ -  0x001622f0 2f627265 61647761 6c6c6574 2d616e64 /breadwallet-and
│ │ -  0x00162300 726f6964 2f636f72 652f4a61 76612f43 roid/core/Java/C
│ │ -  0x00162310 6f72652f 7372632f 6d61696e 2f637070 ore/src/main/cpp
│ │ -  0x00162320 2f636f72 652f7375 70706f72 742f4252 /core/support/BR

This looks like NDK being the culprit for part of the diff, apart from it being the wrong version. Hopefully with Docker this can be improved.

Our verdict

We conclude that we hope for a quick resolution of the issues but for now this wallet remains not verifiable.

(lw)

Verdict Explained

Without public source of the reviewed release available, this product cannot be verified!

As part of our Methodology, we ask: