A Bitcoin wallet for iPhone that keeps the keys on the iPhone

What iOS gives a Bitcoin wallet that other platforms do not

Three things, and they matter more than any feature list. The first is the Secure Enclave: a separate coprocessor with its own memory that can hold and use a key without ever handing the key itself to the main processor or to an app. BitHedge uses it to hold the key that encrypts your recovery phrase, so the encrypted phrase on disk is worthless without that specific piece of silicon in that specific phone.

The second is the Keychain protection classes. An item marked WhenUnlockedThisDeviceOnly is readable only while the phone is unlocked and is excluded by Apple from iCloud and iTunes backups. That closes a failure mode people rarely think about: an encrypted wallet quietly copied into a cloud backup, where it is only ever as safe as the account password protecting that backup.

The third is app sandboxing. On a desktop, any process running as your user can generally read any file you can read. On iOS it cannot. That is not a small difference for something holding money.

What a phone wallet still cannot protect you from

Being honest about this is more useful than another paragraph about encryption. A wallet on a phone is a hot wallet. The key is on an internet-connected device you carry into cafés and airports and hand to people to take photographs. No amount of Secure Enclave changes that category.

• Someone who has your phone and your passcode can generally get to everything on it, wallet included. A shoulder-surfed passcode in a bar followed by a stolen phone is the single most common way phone wallets are drained.
• You, persuaded. Every real-world recovery-phrase theft we know of ends with the owner typing the words into something. Support impersonators, fake “wallet validation” sites, a helpful stranger in a Telegram group. No app can stop this; it can only refuse to ever ask you for the phrase itself, which BitHedge does.
• A photograph of the phrase. A screenshot goes to your photo library and from there to iCloud Photos and any app you have granted photo access. BitHedge warns you the moment you screenshot the backup screen, but it cannot undo it.

The correct conclusion is not “do not use a phone wallet”. It is: keep on the phone what you would carry in a physical wallet, and put long-term savings on a hardware wallet kept offline. BitHedge is built for the first job and does not pretend to do the second.

How BitHedge does it on iPhone

Setup is one screen: create a wallet or restore one. There is no email step, no verification code, no name, no country picker, no risk questionnaire. The app generates a 12-word BIP39 recovery phrase on the device, shows it once, and makes you type several of the words back before it will let you continue — because a phrase you have not confirmed you wrote down is a phrase you have not written down.

From there it is a wallet and nothing else: receive on a fresh address each time, send with a review screen that shows the fee and what is left afterwards, and bump a stuck transaction with RBF rather than starting over. Choose Taproot or Native SegWit addresses in Settings, or point it at your own node if you run one.

Requirements