Where are my coins actually kept? Inside the wallet app?

This is the single most useful thing to get straight early: a wallet is a key, not a vault. Your coins are not inside the app. They're recorded on the blockchain — a shared ledger that lives everywhere, not on your phone. What the wallet app holds is the *key* that proves those entries are yours and lets you move them. So if you lose your phone, you haven't lost your coins — you've lost one copy of the key. As long as you safely saved your recovery phrase (the list of words the wallet gave you at setup), you can install the wallet on a new device, restore with that phrase, and your coins are still right there on the ledger. The flip side, and the part to take seriously: if you lose the phone *and* the recovery phrase, nobody can recover it for you — there's no support line that can. And anyone who gets your recovery phrase has the key. So the whole game of "keeping crypto safe" is really "keeping that phrase safe." Wallets are keys. Treat the phrase like the only key to a house with no locksmith.