I was pretty excited to try Eclair and took notes as I did it so I could share my experience:

1. Went to Google Play Store. Downloaded Eclair Wallet for Mainnet (be careful. Eclair for Testnet is the first app to show up on the Play Store.)

2. Downloaded it. 23 MB took about 1 minute on wifi.

3. Set it up. Copying down the 24 word seed phrase took 30 seconds. Then I had to verify that I wrote down the seed phrase which by typing in 3 of the words.

4. W00t! Eclair is all set up. Now to send a few bits from an exchange to my new wallet. I got lucky and it confirmed within 5 minutes.

5. I want to open a channel. I’ll just open one to the ACINQ node because there’s a button that does that automatically.

6. It’s been 5 whole minutes and my channel still isn’t open. I’m going to get a burrito and maybe when I’m back it’ll be open.

7. I now have a burrito and an open lightning channel 🙂 Time to buy stickers and a t-shirt.

8. Put 2 stickers and a t-shirt in my cart at the Blockstream store. Type in my address. Blockstream store generates a payment request QR code. I scan it. 3 errors. I think the channels between Eclair’s node and blockstream have some sort of issue but I don’t feel like troubleshooting it now.

9. Close the channel to ACINQ node so I can put funds in a channel to a node with more connections.

10. I want to connect to the SLEEPYARK node. It looks well-connected. The only ways to add a specific node are to either paste in the node URI or scan a QR code. I can’t find SLEEPYARK’s URI in a QR code nor in the ‘nodeId@host:port’ format anywhere and I don’t like typing on my phone so I’m going to make a QR code on my computer by googling the nodeId, host and port and putting them in the appropriate format, then converting it to a QR code on some random website.

11. Put 2 stickers and a t-shirt in my cart at the Blockstream store. Type in my address. Blockstream store generates a payment request QR code. I scan it. PAYMENT SENT! Wow that was fast (fraction of a second).

12. Write reddit post about my experience.

Summary: Setting up Eclair was easy. If you can figure out how to set up a Coinbase account with 2FA you can figure out how to set up Eclair.

It took about 5 minutes of my attention to set up (if you don’t count the time spent waiting for tx confirmation). The future is pretty much here! I don’t think finding good nodes to connect to is idiot-proof yet. Blockstream Shop charged me $12 to mail a t-shirt and 2 stickers which seems excessive.

But soon everyone will see my t-shirt and know that I do not subscribe to the ideology of trusted 3rd parties.