A bitcoin mining app on a smartphone does not mine any bitcoin worth having. Even if your phone could compute one billion hashes per second, which no phone can, at the current difficulty it would earn around 0.00003 euros a day and need just over 20 million years on average to find a single block. That is why Apple does not allow mining on the iPhone at all, and Google banished such apps from the Play Store in 2018. If an app still shows you payouts, they come from somewhere else: from rented computing power in a data centre, from advertising revenue, or from a points system that shares nothing with mining but the name.
This guide runs the numbers on why that is, explains the three business models behind mining apps and shows how to spot dubious offers. If what you really want is to own bitcoin, a regulated crypto exchange gets you your coins far more cheaply than any mining app.
Bitcoin mining on a smartphone: the maths of hashrate and difficulty
In mining, computers keep calculating a checksum until one of them falls below a target value set by the network. Whoever finds a valid value first may attach the next block to the blo...
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