Something we’ve learned over the last six months is that users tend to use Zap Desktop much differently than Zap iOS. The Desktop app seems to be a home base of sorts. Users use Zap Desktop to control many different nodes and manage many different wallets, channels, liquidity, etc. Zap iOS is used more like Cash App: a quick and simple way for users to spend bitcoins on various services. We wanted to redesign our Desktop application to better reflect what users wanted out of it. With the Launchpad users can now create and manage as many wallets as they’d like, easily connect and drive remote nodes, or control their BTCPay Server.

Wallet Configuration

You can now configure your autopilot settings within Zap from the Launchpad. You can completely turn it off, change the percentage of your balance autopilot uses, and configure things like the max amount of channels and the size of those channels. This type of flexibility is a huge improvement in user experience and allows users much more control over their Lightning experience.

LNDConnect

With technology like neutrino still in an early testnet only state, Zap is frequently used to connect to remote nodes with a more stable Lightning stack. Historically, the process of connecting Zap to a remote node has been painful to say the least. There is a lot of room for improvement going forward, but we got the ball rolling with lndconnect. lndconnect allows other services, such as Pierre Rochard’s Node Launcher or the Casa Node, to host a “Connect to Zap” button that will open Zap and automatically connect to the remote node. Alternatively, lndconnect potentially allows Zap Desktop to host a “Connect to Joule” button in the future that would seamlessly onboard users to the Joule browser plugin, or other external services. We encourage all developers to take a look at the lndconnect documentation here and integrate with Zap/give us feedback!

Litecoin Support

It’s true, in response to user requests, Zap now supports connecting to remote Litecoin Lightning nodes. Although the Lightning Network was conceptualized with scaling Bitcoin in mind while adding some privacy enhancements, it is a protocol designed agnostic to the underlying blockchain. The Litecoin dev team is currently working on implementing neutrino (light client) support within LTCD, so that one day users can launch their wallet on the Bitcoin blockchain, log out, and then switch chains to Litecoin. This is not supported yet, but potentially soon. For now you can simply connect to a remote Litecoin LND node to use Litecoin + Zap if you’d like.

New Payment Flow

Zap Desktop 0.3.0 has an all new sending/receiving flow that vastly improves on prior versions. New design, fee estimation, ability to specify amounts on zero value invoices (tippin.me) and much more.