I'm sure you have an old phone sitting idle at home and may have thought if you could use it to mine some cryptocurrency. That was my thought this weekend and decided to look what alternatives are available.
During my initial research I got the following conclusions:
There seem to be apps in Google Play that claim to be mining Bitcoin and others, and most seem to be on the scam side of things. For starters mining Bitcoin, Litecoin and other ASIC oriented coins is just not viable unless you have especialized ASIC hardware. So if an app promises to mine BTC, stay away from it.
There are apps that claim to pay you Bitcoin for watching videos. These so called faucet apps seem to be quite shady and while you may want to try them, I can only recommend to be extremely cautious and not very optimistic about the promised reward.
I did find an app that seemed to be reputable: Crypto Miner. (However I struggled finding instructions and the only half decent tutorial I found was in spanish
And then there is MinerGate. They provide mining software for mac, linux, windows, as well as an app for Android. It seems to require very little configuration (create a user in their website and log in with those details in the app), so it was worth trying.
I have been mining now for a day and I can share my conclusions:
If you want to mine any cryptocurrency you need to get into account the processing power (expresed in Hash/second) and the electricity consumed. In my case the electricity is paid by the landlord, so I could remove that from the equation and I was hopping it could make my mining profitable.
I choose to mine Monero as it seemed to be the most profitable of the coins available in Miner Gate (forget about BTC, or LTC, and ETH and ETC will not give you much. From the Cryptonight algorithm coins Monero is the most valuable. Bytecoin gives more coins over the same time, but it's value is too low).
My phone is a HTC one M8 (Quad-core 2.3 GHz), and was getting between 8-11 H/s. How good or bad is that?
You can check in What to Mine and see that 8 H/s, running 24 hours, would give me 0.0001 XMR that at current value is about 0.0094 USD (1 XMR=94$ today)
The bottom line:
The reality is that after 24 hours I had 0.000028081611 XMR. And if we consider that you need to get 0,1 XMR mined to be able to withdraw it (the app says it is 0,005, but the website says the minimum is 0,1) that means I would need to leave the phone on and charging for 3561 days.
The phone gets very hot, and probably will end up breaking down before I ever get that 0,1 XMR. If you add the cost of the electricity you will certainly lose money.
There are a considerable amount of complaints from people claiming that MinerGate is not transferring their funds. I cannot confirm anything on that regard, but definitely mining on the app does not make any economical sense.
I have no reason to believe that any other app would perform much better. Unless you are getting free electricity and at least 80-100 H/s, just don't even bother.
However, if you still want to give it a try, you can use the affiliate link here: https://minergate.com/a/96b59897476448a666df0d1e so you get a better start than when I tried.
EDIT I'd like to clear that in the last 24 hours the app has stopped a lot of times, so the actual mining time would be around 15 hours. So it is definitely not an automated hands-off process. This is another factor to consider to understand that is absolutely not worth mining using an android phone.