How to Mine Bitcoin on Android

The technical requirements for Bitcoin mining have changed a lot since the coin’s early days – somewhere between 2009, the year of its inception, and 2015, the year when BTC hit $1,000. Back then, Bitcoin was an innovative, rather far-fetched idea of how we can transact with money without interference from a centralised bank. It was a time when anyone with a solid computer could do some mining and earn BTC. 

Nowadays, Bitcoin mining has become an exclusively expensive endeavor. It requires a large investment in highly specialised machines, known as mining rigs, an adapted space, and cooling power to protect the perpetually running hardware from overheating.

The number of Bitcoin hunters has grown exponentially with its global popularity, so you would need a ridiculously great amount of computing power to maintain the busy sprawling ledger where Bitcoin resides. With this in mind, the whole concept of mining BTC on your Android device seems a bit impractical, but technically, it’s not impossible.

How to mine cryptocurrency on Android? To mine using your phone, you only need to download an app like MinerGate and Bitcoin Miner. They are mobile apps that let you join in a mining pool and are compatible with iOS and Android operating systems.

How To Mine Crypto on Android

Living in a time when Bitcoin’s price hits historic heights must have tempted you to dig deeper into its technical background regardless of the level of your digital competency. Eventually, you’d realise that all commercial buy-and-sell activities lie at the very root of Bitcoin mining. Furthermore, you’ll notice that the equipment for lucrative mining rewards has reached an industrial level (think of mining pools) consisting of sophisticated ASIC miners. 

Bitcoin mining has become a global phenomenon where mining farms and well-equipped individuals compete to validate more transactions and get rewarded with newly-created coins in return.

The more powerful mining hardware they use, the more competitive they appear to be on the market, which has become immensely aggressive due to the skyrocketing price of Bitcoin. 

Mobile mining operations work on the same principles but on a drastically lower scale. Using your Android device, you can join a mining pool or farm, but the proportion of your potential reward will be insignificant compared to other miners who use rigs. 

In 2018, Google forbade pairing your Android hardware with on-device mining equipment and banned the entire in-app mining software because it proved that this type of mining device put the device’s hardware components at risk by causing it to overheat and drain its battery.

These same regulations were implemented to iOS devices by Apple shortly after. However, Google allowed users to keep downloading apps from Google Play Store that involve mining from remote locations, so did Apple from App Store. 

How To Mine Bitcoin on Android Phone

There are two approaches you should consider if you decide you want to start mining BTC on Android as a mining tool.

Solo Mining

Given the fact that each Bitcoin contains a cryptographically generated address of 64 bits, as well as the buoyant demand against the limited supply of 21 million BTC units, going solo with your Android is extremely difficult. It’ll take a few months until you earn a considerable fraction of Bitcoin. 

Joining a Bitcoin Mining Pool

Pool mining consists of a server-hoster group of miners working together and sharing the mining reward proportionally to their individual mining hash power. Even though the main profit is always distributed to the miner’s owner, mining pools are a favourable solution for an average miner since the reward amount is rather predictable and relatively stable. Moreover, miners can shift to another mining pool at any time and redirect their processing power to a more profitable pool. 

However, it’s hard to find out which mining pool would bring better profits, so the best thing you can do before joining one is to take into account its size.

The pool size accurately indicates the payment regularity, the fees, and the reward method. Thus, there are pools that utilize a pay-per-share (PPS) technique and pay you a fixed amount per submitted block, while others are classified as score-based since they give you a portion of the shares, calculated after a block is founded, depending on how long you’ve stayed on the pool.

Bitcoin Mining Apps

There are a couple of crypto-mining apps designed for Android that enable users to mine BTC without investing in expensive CPU or– Graphics card (GPU) processors. Such Android apps connect you with mining pools where multiple users combine their computing power and share rewards accordingly.

You can easily find the apps on Playstore under the names of MinerGate and Bitcoin Miner.

Just like the majority of interactive mobile apps, crypto-mining apps do require you to create an account on their webpage prior to downloading the app on your mobile. This means that if you want to change the pool or quit this activity, you’ll have to undertake additional actions to delete your account and/or remove the app from your Android smartphone.

Bitcoin Miner

Bitcoin Miner is another free-to-download app that offers you the possibility to mine Bitcoin on your phone. This was one of the earliest mining apps on the market and allowed you to mine concurrently with your daily communication and activities without compromising the phone’s performance.

After downloading the app, it’ll create revenue running in the background of your mobile phone. You can choose between two types of mining pools and shift smoothly from one to the other: PPLNS (pay-per-last-n shares) or SMPPS (shared maximum pay per share). Your profit will depend on the frequency of your phone actively mining BTC.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is cloud mining?

Cloud mining is when someone buys into a company’s mining operation using his/her computer instead of buying physical hardware. The idea behind cloud mining is that you don’t need any additional equipment besides what you already have. This allows anyone who has access to the internet to participate in mining. To know more, you can read our article, How Does Cloud Mining Work? here.

A Few Words Before You Go…

The idea of mining BTC on the go appears to be super-attractive at first sight as you’re not expected to have expensive equipment or profound knowledge on the subject. A decent internet connection and a reliable mobile app can do all the work in the back while you’re making an important business call. In reality, however, things are more complex than that. 

First, you can’t do much solely from an Android mobile device with a limited hash rate against the five-figure expensive rigs, nor can you expect significant passive income from downloading a mining app. However, doing so can’t be harmful as it’ll definitely help you learn the basics of the mining process and the existing hierarchy in mining pools.

However, If you strongly believe that the BTC “storehouse” won’t be drained soon or you find Bitcoin mining appealing for various reasons, then investing in a sophisticated hardware set is a must.

Due to the huge demand, crypto coins that are deeply rooted in the market, such as BTC, Ethereum (ETH), and Litecoin (LTC) might not be the best cryptocurrency type to start mining with. So, maybe you’ll like the idea of turning to another mining algorithm that is more environmentally efficient and faster compared to what the overloaded Bitcoin blockchain can offer you at this point.

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