Issues with Lightning Payments, Need Help

I've been trying to make lightning payments to myself using different apps, my own node, and now Electrum but nothing is working. Phoenix keeps going offline whenever I switch apps like Breez. I turned off tor, not in power-saving mode, and didn't close the app, but every time I go back it just says connecting. When I send from Phoenix to Breez, it says the recipient is offline. And when I try Breez to Phoenix, I always get a no route error. Oh, and sending from Phoenix to my node via Zeus gives me a "fee insufficient" error.

Sounds like your device is limiting background activity. If you’re on Android, try this: Go to App management Phoenix wallet App battery usage and select unrestricted. That should help with the connectivity issues when switching apps.

I already did that for background usage and it's still not fixed. And even when I’m receiving from Electrum on my computer, I kept Phoenix open in the foreground.

You got a lot going on here, OP. It could be network issues or software problems. Try checking your node connection, channel liquidity, and also the fees. From my experience, restarting both apps and nodes sometimes helps but not sure if you’ve done that already. Lightning network can be tricky.

Quick question: does the receiving channel even have enough capacity for the payments you're trying? You didn’t mention that part. Phoenix usually gives decent receiving capacity when a channel opens, but you still need to cover routing fees.

I think I figured it out. The channel on Phoenix had enough inbound capacity but I had less than 10k sats in Phoenix, so it wouldn’t open new channels. I added more on-chain to Phoenix, sent from Electrum, and it worked right away. Sent back to Electrum too, and that was fast as well. Thanks!

If there was enough inbound capacity, Phoenix wouldn’t have needed to create a new channel. So, it sounds like the channel didn’t have enough capacity to receive the funds, which is why it failed when you tried to send from Electrum to Phoenix.