Is it possible to / should one use a Lightning Network client? When looking at all of the examples with the Lightning Network, they involve "Alice" and "Bob". Alice is usually sending some kind of payment to Bob (or vice-versa). The thing is, "Alice" and "Bob" are Lightning Network daemons. From my understanding, these LN daemons require "BTCD" in order to work properly (or work at all).

Payment Channels also seem to require the use of the "Public ID" of a Lightning Network node in order to be created.

FROM: https://themerkle.com/what-is-the-lightning-network-daemon/


  LND requires BTCD as its direct connection to the Bitcoin blockchain.
  The daemon has to receive on-chain event information in some way, and
  using BTCD is the most viable solution right now.


I have also seen that BTCD needs to be synched(?) properly (which could take > 12 hours to do).

So, with that, how excactly is one to run a LN Node on their Smartphone (especially since a BTCD node - which is not pruned - is needed for the LN Node to function in the first place)?

Is some other kind of client software supposed to be used? If so, what is it?

TIA
If you want full functionality and have a trustless setup, you need to run your own Bitcoin node to watch the blockchain, and run an Lightning implementation (LND, c-lightning or Eclair) on top. 


LND uses either BTCD or Bitcoin Core (since v0.4?)
c-lightning uses Bitcoin Core
Eclair uses Bitcoin Core


But you cannot run a full node on your mobile phone, therefore the mobile Lightning node/wallet needs to connect to a remote Bitcoin node. This could probably be achieved using current SPV, but this is bad for privacy &amp; I am not aware of a mobile app that does this. In the future, a different method (Neutrino) will be used for this purpose, which is being tested on testnet.

You can already use the Eclair Lightning wallet on your (Android 5+) phone. Not sure how they connect to their remote Bitcoin node. This app also supports opening a channel to a random node. 

For the full LND node, no config is needed, as this node has an "autopilot" feature that opens and closes channels automatically.