Buying your first bitcoin on a phone: every screen you’ll see

Nothing about a phone makes this harder. In one respect it makes it easier: the identity check is designed around a phone camera, and it passes more often there than on a laptop webcam. What changes is where things are, and small screens are better at hiding a number than large ones.

Installing the app without installing the wrong one

Fake exchange apps appear in app stores regularly. They look correct, use the right logo, and take your credentials the moment you type them.

Two habits handle it:

• Check the developer name and the review count, not the icon. A real exchange app has an enormous number of ratings and a developer name that matches the company. A convincing fake has a few hundred ratings and a developer name that is almost right.
• Reach the store listing from the exchange's own website, typed into the browser yourself, rather than from a search result inside the app store or a link someone sent you.

Never install an exchange app from a link in a message, an email, or a QR code someone showed you, and never from a downloaded file outside the official store. That last one is the delivery method for most crypto-stealing malware on Android.

Sign-up on a small screen

Identical fields to the desktop version, stacked. Email or phone, password, a code sent to whichever you used.

The referral field is the thing that gets missed on mobile, because on a narrow screen it collapses into a single line of small text reading something like Enter referral ID (optional). Tapping it opens the box. It can generally only be filled at sign-up, so if you intend to use one, do it now rather than planning to add it later — there is no later. The account guide covers what that field actually does.

Use a password manager rather than inventing something you can type comfortably with thumbs. Thumb-friendly passwords are short passwords.

Verification: the step where the phone wins

The identity check wants a photograph of your document and a live capture of your face, with movement prompts to confirm you are a present human rather than a photograph. A phone does all of this natively. A laptop webcam usually does it badly.

What passes:

• Physical document, flat on a dark, matte surface, all four corners inside the frame.
• Even indirect light. Not direct sun, not overhead spotlights that bounce off the laminate.
• Face uncovered — no hat, no glasses, hair off the face — against a plain wall.
• Following the movement prompts at normal speed. Rushing them fails the liveness check.

What fails, reliably: photographing your ID on another screen, uploading an old scan from your photo library, or capturing in a dim room. The failure guide is organised by error message if you have already been rejected.

If the app asks for camera permission and you said no once: it will not ask again. You have to grant it in your phone's system settings, which is not obvious from inside the app, and it looks like the verification step is broken when it is not.

Two-factor on the same device

Slight awkwardness here: if the authenticator app and the exchange app are on one phone, losing that phone loses both at once.

It still beats SMS codes, which can be redirected by moving your number to a new SIM. So: authenticator app rather than text messages, and then write the backup key on paper when it is displayed during setup. Do not screenshot it — that puts your recovery key in your photo library, which syncs to wherever your photos sync to.

If you have an old phone or a tablet in a drawer, putting the authenticator there instead is a genuinely better arrangement and costs nothing.

Funding, and the tap that costs the most

The app usually offers a saved card as the top option, one tap away. That is the most expensive ordinary route on most platforms, and the convenience gap over a bank transfer is measured in days while the cost gap is measured in percent. The comparison is worth two minutes before the first deposit.

If a card payment is declined, it is usually your bank rather than the app — a large share of banks block crypto merchants by default. Retrying repeatedly does not help and can get the attempt flagged.

The buy screen, and the number that is collapsed by default

Enter an amount in your own currency; the app shows the quantity of bitcoin you will receive. Then, before confirming, find the fee breakdown. On most apps it is behind a small chevron, a “details” toggle, or a line of grey text on the confirmation sheet.

Expand it. You are looking for three things:

1. The quantity you actually receive, after costs — not the amount you typed.
2. Any stated fee, as a line item.
3. The rate you are being given, which on the simplified widget is generally not the mid-market rate you saw quoted elsewhere. The difference is the spread, and it is a real cost even though it never appears as a fee.

Which costs are visible and which are inside the price is the page to read once, before your second purchase.

Afterwards: two settings and one note

Turn on login and withdrawal notifications so an unexpected one reaches you immediately. Turn off price alerts unless you have a specific reason for one — a notification saying an asset moved is not information, it is a prompt to open the app, which is what it was designed to be.

Then write down what you did: date, amount, quantity received, fee, platform. On a phone the temptation to skip this is stronger because typing is annoying. It is still the item on the post-purchase list people most often regret skipping, usually at tax time.