Uniswap Launches Mobile Ethereum Wallet on Android

Leading decentralized exchange Uniswap released a mobile crypto wallet for Android on Thursday, months after doing the same on Apple’s iOS platform.

The app is currently in beta while the company invites members of the DeFi community to help it test the wallet before it’s released more widely to users. As per Uniswap’s Twitter feed, some 35,000 users have already signed up to the waitlist.

In line with the beta launch, the Uniswap Labs team will also open-source the code as part of its Trail of Bits audit. Trail of Bits is a cybersecurity company that offers blockchain auditing, and develops Web3 tools that identify and fix vulnerabilities in smart contracts and other parts of code.

Bridgett Frey, a spokesperson for Uniswap Labs, told Decrypt that the Android app is launching today in beta to “ensure we iron out” any issues as the firm onboards new users, with a broader release expected before the end of the year.

According to the Uniswap team, the newly unveiled wallet comes with a set of features for what the firm thinks “makes a great swap.” A blog post announcing the app’s beta launch promises split-second swaps, easy discovery of new tokens, and transparent pricing that seeks to highlight fees that aren’t readily apparent to traders.

Another feature is automatic switching between blockchain mainnets, like Ethereum, and layer-2 scaling networks like Optimism or Arbitrum.

For users looking to swap between layers, Uniswap Labs says the Android wallet will automatically guess the desired target and make the switch. It will offer access to Arbitrum, Polygon, Optimism, Base and BNB Chain.

Two common exploits in DeFi are known as sandwich and frontrunning attacks. The former refers to when an attacker sandwiches a swap between two transactions to make a profit; the latter occurs when an attacker sees a pending transaction, and knowing the price for which a token will be swapped, submits their own swap.

In order to defend users against these types of attacks, Uniswap has added “swap protection” to the Android mobile wallet. Essentially, swaps will now default to a private transaction pool, defending users from such MEV attacks.

Today’s launch comes six months after Uniswap launched a version of the app for the Apple iPhone, which the Uniswap Labs team said became a top three download the month it launched. A Uniswap Labs spokesperson did not immediately provide download statistics.

Referring to today's release, Frey told Decrypt that Uniswap Labs “always knew that we would want to quickly follow the iOS launch with an Android app, as Uniswap is a global product and much of the world does not use Apple.”

The protocol has been under regulatory fire in recent months, after a class action lawsuit was filed against it. The case against Uniswap was ultimately tossed out by New York Judge Katherine Polk Failla, in a ruling that a legal scholar dubbed “a strange kind of anomaly.”