Phone or computer
The honest objection to mobile is not technical. It is that mobile makes the one habit that matters annoying enough to skip.
A computer you control
- What you gain
- Signature checking is straightforward, so the habit survives. You can see what you are copying and control what else runs.
- What you give up
- Not always available, and not always private.
- Suits
- Anyone who can. This is the default.
A phone
- What you gain
- Available, private in the sense that it is yours, and generally the device people actually have.
- What you give up
- Checking a signature is inconvenient enough that people stop, and stopping is worth more than every other difference combined.
- Suits
- People who will genuinely still check, and who have worked out how before they need to.
A shared or work machine
- What you gain
- Nothing.
- What you give up
- Everything on this site assumes a machine you control. Verification runs locally, so a machine that can be made to lie makes the whole exercise theatre.
- Suits
- Nobody. This is one of the few hard blockers here.
Why the usual objection is the wrong one
People argue about whether a phone is inherently less secure, which is a long argument with no clean answer. The practical objection is narrower and much easier to settle: on a phone, copying a signed block into something that can check it is fiddly, and fiddly things stop happening.
A tool that makes the load bearing habit annoying removes the habit, and that is a larger risk than any property of the platform itself.
The other differences
| Computer | Phone | |
|---|---|---|
| Checking a signature | Straightforward | Fiddly, which is the whole problem |
| Seeing a full address | Easy | Truncated by default, which hides the part that matters |
| Knowing what else is running | Reasonably | Much less so |
| Backups and sync | Under your control | Frequently on by default and easy to forget |
| Availability | Sometimes | Always, which is why people use it |
What tips it
Whether the address is truncated on your screen. That single detail decides more than anything else here, because a forged address matches the opening characters and differs in the middle, and a display that shows you the start and an ellipsis is showing you exactly the part that always matches.