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FreeWallet

Latest release: 0.1.9 ( 17th March 2019 ) 🔍 Last analysed 1st October 2021 . Failed to build from source provided! Not updated in a long time
4.2 ★★★★★
82 ratings
10 thousand
1st September 2016

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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 

The provider of this Freewallet reached out to us to stress that freewallet.io was not the same as freewallet.org which is spamming Google Play with many wallets and we have reviewed three of those here, too:

He says that his wallet is non-custodial and open source and indeed we see those same claims on Google Play.

On the website we read:

Open Source
FreeWallet Mobile is open-source, and available for anyone to fork or review, so you know that it works exactly the way that it is supposed to.

and indeed we find a repository. It had no changes for two years and also Google Play does not report any changes since March 2019 but this looks like open source.

Unfortunately there is no build instructions so we cannot reproduce the app and it remains 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:

Obsolete!

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.