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Breez: Lightning Client & POS

Latest release: VARY ( 23rd October 2022 ) 🔍 Last analysed 13th September 2022 . Failed to build from source provided! Review might be outdated
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The Analysis 

A description to our liking. Here it is in full:

Breez is a Lightning Network client which makes paying in bitcoin a seamless experience. With Breez, anyone can send or receive small payments in bitcoin. It’s simple, fast and safe.

Ok, seamless, lightning, … nice.

Breez is a non-custodial service that uses lnd and Neutrino under the hood.

We want to hear that! Be your own bank!

For more technical information, please go to: https://github.com/breez/breezmobile.

So they are non-custodial and provide source code. More work for us :)

Warning: the app is still in beta and there is a chance your money will be lost. Use this app only if you are willing to take this risk.

That’s certainly inspiring more confidence than other apps with 2 months of track record claiming to be the best in the world. :)

Well, in terms of Build Instructions the app is lacking.

$ git clone git@github.com:breez/breezmobile.git
$ cd breezmobile/
$ git tag
0.5-openbeta
0.5.8-openbeta
0.5.9-openbeta
0.7-openbeta
0.8.improvements

As on the playstore it says “Current Version: Varies with device”, we go with what google gives us when we install it on a phone: 0.8-beta. The best match above would thus be the tag 0.8.improvements:

$ git checkout 0.8.improvements 
$ cat android/app/build.gradle | grep version
        versionCode 1
        versionName "0.8-beta"
            versionNameSuffix "-pos"

looks good so far. For now. We will not guess like this in the future.

Build breez.aar and bindings.framework as decribed in breez/breez

$ git submodule status 
$

… so … the build instructions give no clue which version of breez/breez to build and there is no submodule?

$ git clone git@github.com:breez/breez.git
$ cd breez
$ git tag
0.5-openbeta
0.5.8-openbeta

Had there been a 0.8… in the breez project, we would have had a clue where to go next but absent that, there is no hope of reproducing the app. For now our verdict is: not verifiable.

(lw)

Verdict Explained

We encountered a build error while compiling from source code!

As part of our Methodology, we ask:

Build Error!

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.

But we also ask:

Review Outdated!

Does our review and verdict apply to their latest release?

If the answer is "no", we mark it as "Review might be outdated".

Verdicts apply to very specific releases of products and never to the product as a whole. A new release of a product can change the product completely and thus also the verdict. This product remains listed according to its latest verdict but readers are advised to do their own research as this product might have changed for the better or worse.

This meta verdict is applied manually in cases of reviews that we identify as requiring an update.

This meta verdict applies to all products with verdict “reproducible” as soon as a new version is released until we test that new version, too. It also applies in cases where issues we opened are marked as resolved by the provider.

If we had more resources, we would update reviews more timely instead of assigning this meta verdict ;)