I am trying to develop an android wallet using Ethereum go and I ran the DroidGeth from this link. I tried to ran ethereum on the testnet, but its taking for ever to download the blockchain.
How can I start geth in a light weight mode or spv mode as in bitcoin ? So that I can run it on a smartphone, without downloading the full blockchain ?
Is there a better way to do it ?
Light clients are in the works, mostly working, though pre-alpha state. They are developed as part of the go-ethereum project. You can find more infos in the light client gitter channel: https://gitter.im/ethereum/light-client .
Further go-ethereum is starting to do experimental android and ios libraries covering a wide variety of features, among others also light client support. It already works. Please see https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/wiki/Mobile-Clients:-Libraries-and-Inproc-Ethereum-Nodes for details.
There are no light clients available yet. Some of are progress related to cpp-ethereum project.
For light weight wallet app do a hosted server side wallet. The server communicates with Ethereum node (geth). Each registered user has their own wallet contract. Mobile application communicates with the server over proprietary protocol.
android? without downloading the fullblockchain?