Hive’s development team made the announcement yesterday: due to lack of capital, their operations have been halted for a while, although it wasn’t officially announced until then.
The wallet, available for the web, Android, and iOS platforms was never wildly popular, but it cultivated a loyal user base. Its latest user counts listed over 8,000 installs on Android devices and approximately 50,000 divided between web and iOS users.
Hive’s creator, Wendell Davis, broke the news in response to a thread posted on r/Bitcoin regarding one user’s problems while attempting to access his web wallet, which led to several attempts to contact support.
“I apologize for the issues people have been having with Hive, and I probably should have announced the glacial (not entirely frozen, see below) development of Hive. On the other hand, I assumed that everyone knows our GitHub URL ( github.com/hivewallet ) and could easily make that judgment for themselves.
Hive Web and Hive iOS are BIP32/BIP39 compatible, so you should be able to directly use your passphrase in any other wallet supporting this standard, including the excellent Bread Wallet, and I believe Mycelium as well.
It would be nice if some new maintainers for one or more of the platforms appeared, because with the patches that Wei created recently ( live @ http://hive-js.herokuapp.com[2] ) it actually does work fine. However, these changes have not been rolled into the iOS version, and no one left over here who might touch it uses OS X for development anymore.”
An announcement was also made via Twitter after Davis published the thread:
Hive’s Status: Officially Unsupported. We recommend migrating your tokens to another wallet.
Several users took the opportunity to voice their discontent at the manner in which the announcement was handled, especially after it was made clear that development had basically been halted for over a year without the dev team attempting to contact users in order to inform them.
Davis defended their position reminding users that since they didn’t require any identifying contact information at sign up for privacy purposes, they effectively were unable to reach all of their users via a single channel. The possibility of an iOS update was also out of the question since their main developer for that platform no longer formed part of the team.
In one of his comments, Davis mentioned that Hive’s team had already completed the design of a new wallet service with improved architecture. Considering how Hive’s development fizzed out, it’s hard to imagine whether they will be able to find funding in order to actually start work on it, or be able to regain the trust of their userbase.
