The Splitwise Blog

We’re excited to announce a new addition to our iOS app family: Splitwise for iPad! It went live on the App Store on Friday and has already earned some great reviews from the community.  

Previously, iPad users could access Splitwise by using our unoptimized iPhone app, or by visiting splitwise.com in their tablet browser. Neither provided a first class experience.

We’re thrilled to finally have a specific iPad offering that takes advantage of the device’s rotation capabilities, split screen view, and increased real estate.

The most notable feature addition is ‘charts’: when drilled into the FRIENDS or GROUPS tabs, the right-hand view displays two spending charts: ‘your total balance’ (a bar graph) and ‘spending by category’ (a pie chart).

The ‘your total balance’ chart, which displays users’ total Splitwise balance by day, is particularly ground-breaking for us. It’s the first time we’ve calculated and displayed historical balances in Splitwise versus just the present day balance.

Another noticeable improvement is to the expense list. On iPad each expense has its full date printed to the left of the ‘description’, thanks to the extra width granted by landscape mode.

Tap on any expense to reveal ‘expense details’ in the right-hand pane; the left-hand view won’t shift at all. This means users can check many ‘expense details’ views without having to drill down, then back out, etc.

Splitwise for iPad was championed by Novall, with help from Marshall and Ryan. Novall and Marshall will be at WWDC in June; email wwdc@splitwise.com to say hi and possibly coordinate a meet-up with them! In the same vein, email googleio@splitwise.com to connect with Splitwise at the Google I/O conference later this month (Apoorv and Zoe).

Our users have been begging us to support 😈 😍 😂 input.

We👂 their 🙏 in a big way. Starting today, the Splitwise web app will be 💯 comprised of emojis. Before switching over to emoji mode, 👀  these 🔑 terms:

Expense: 📃 💸
Payment: 💴 👉
Friend: 🐶

Check out emoji mode and let us know what you think! To switch off emoji mode back to boring old English / Italian / etc, just click this link.

Wait. Seriously? 😳

✨Totally✨. Well, sort of. Happy April Fools’ Day!

We are genuinely excited to announce that starting now, you can use emoji in any field on Splitwise, including:

– Expense description (🍕 $20)
– Group names (Our 🏠)
– User names (Jane Doe 👽)
– Expense comments (“Thanks for the 🍷, see you soon!”)
– The group whiteboard (“OMG our apartment is haunted 👻”)

We 💖 you and that’s no joke.

Splitwise for Android Version 4.0 is the polished, powerful app our Android community deserves. We’re excited to announce that it went live in Google Play earlier today, after months of development and testing.

With this update we focused on elevating the look and functionality of the app. Google’s material design paradigm helped us build transitions, navigation patterns, and animations that make Splitwise simpler and more delightful to use. We’re thrilled to have an app that exemplifies what’s awesome and unique about Android.

In addition to these major visual changes, we concentrated on improving Splitwise’s core interactions: adding bills and checking balances. We’ve organized the new design around tabs for both individual friends and active groups, with detailed balance information visible right on the dashboard. We’ve also spent some care improving the details of the all-important “add bill” form, and squashed numerous bugs.

“Hefty Otter”, as 4.0 is known internally, was a true team effort that engaged almost every person at Splitwise. It feels amazing to share it with everyone. We can’t wait for the feedback to start rolling in so we can keep on improving.

Read on for a detailed tour of the release.

Continue reading Introducing Splitwise for Android version 4.0

Splitwise for Android v 3.8 includes several improvements to the group invitation process and group member management.

1. Edit invite
Invited someone to a Splitwise group using the wrong email address? Now you can edit unclaimed invites right from ‘group settings’ so everyone can join your group with ease.

2. Resend invite
Did an invite email get lost in your friend’s swamp of an inbox? Now you can resend an invite email from ‘group settings’.

3. Balance display
Group members cannot be removed until they’re all settled up. With this release, on ‘group settings’ you’ll only see the ‘remove’ button next to a member’s name if they’re eligible for deletion. Others will have their present group balance displayed in lieu of the ‘remove’ button. This will make it easier for you to understand at a glance who can and cannot be removed from your group at any given moment.

4. Better invite by phone support for international users
Previously we were unable to pull phone numbers from ‘Contacts’ for international users. This made invite by phone number very tricky because you had to manually enter your friend’s number. Version 3.8 let’s you tap a contact entry to invite them by phone number for most international users (we are still unfortunately unable to do this for folks in France, India, and the UAE).

This version also introduces our German, Italian, and Dutch translations on Android. Many thanks are due to our volunteer translators for making this possible.

Splitwise for iPhone v 4.2 introduces five new features!

1. Split by adjustment

Did someone buy an extra drink at dinner? Using this new split method you can indicate “Sam owes $5 more than everyone else” and Splitwise will do the math for you.

2. 3D Touch

3D Touch is a new iPhone capability available on the 6s device. It has enabled us to implement a feature known as ‘peek and pop’.

Peek and Pop: In any list view, long press the friend/group/expense name to see a preview (ie peek) of the resulting screen. To follow through to that screen (ie pop), just apply a bit more pressure with your finger.

3. 1Password integration

You can now sign up for and log into Splitwise on iPhone using 1Password. This will only be apparent if the 1Password app is already installed on your device.

 

4. TouchID support for passcode lock

To enable TouchID support for passcode lock, first set a numeric passcode from your ‘Me’ tab in the app. Next time you launch Splitwise you will get a prompt to switch over to using TouchID for the passcode instead of the 4-digit code you created. You don’t have to switch if you don’t want to, just hit ‘cancel’ in that alert to keep using the 4-digit code you created. [NB: After setting your numeric passcode please wait at least 2 minutes before relaunching the app to switch over to TouchID]

5. New languages — Dutch, German, Italian

The new languages are available on all platforms. Special thanks to our volunteer translators for putting in a lot of hard work to get the translations ready. If you want to help us edit existing translations / translate Splitwise into new languages, just let us know!

Splitwise for iPhone v 4.1.3 achieves full iOS 9 compatibility. 

Most iOS 9 changes are ‘under the hood’, but there is one exciting user-facing change: we’re now taking advantage of Apple’s text input action functionality for push notifications.    

What does that mean? Splitwise push notifications about expenses and payments will now contain a ‘comment’ field, so you may write and post comments from within the notification, without ever having to open up the Splitwise app.

To reveal this text input field, just tug down the notification from the banner. When finished composing your comment tap ‘send’ to post it. The comment will not post successfully if you are offline.

If you’ve disabled push notifications but feel compelled to reactivate them now, you may do so from your account settings page (contained in the ‘Me’ tab on iOS).

Splitwise has a geographically diverse user base, with folks from 170+ nations using our apps. The joys of living with roommates, traveling with friends, and spotting a buddy for a beer are globally felt: so, too, is the sense of awkwardness when things don’t feel fair. We’re glad to be alleviating this stress for people around the world.

Today Splitwise is excited to announce that we’re deepening our commitment to the international community. We’ve completed the process of internationalization and will now start rolling out translated versions of Splitwise. In addition to appealing to internationally-based people, we know this development will be exciting to the many folks in the U.S. who prefer to communicate in languages besides English.

It all starts today with Splitwise en Español (Spanish!). Available now on all platforms. 

Now that we’ve readied the back-end and clients to display multiple languages, rolling out new languages should be fairly easy — we just need help translating all the terms found throughout the app. Want to help make Splitwise available in your language? Reach out to Product Manager Zoe Chaves at translations@splitwise.com to learn about our Volunteer Translator Program. 

If you want to provide feedback on the Spanish version of the app or any other aspect of Splitwise, we’re always reachable and happy to hear from you at support@splitwise.com.

¡Hurra!

How would I describe my first month at Splitwise? Kick-ass. Absolutely kick-ass. I joined Splitwise as their newest iOS engineer in March, and little did I know I would be in for the time of my life.

My first week, I decided I wanted to pursue a cutting-edge project, and the wonderful thing about working on a small, collaborative team is that I was encouraged to just “go for it!” There is nothing holding you back. When you’ve got an idea, you can just run with it. And let me tell you, I ran. And within a week, the whole team ran the marathon with me.

My idea for the app started out over lunch as an itty-bitty sketch on a napkin. It was a square with some circles and rounded-rect buttons on the inside. But soon we transformed it into a prototype of something very real – an Apple Watch app.

The inspiration for the app was the idea that users can speak to add their expenses. For the first time in Splitwise history, adding an expense is as simple as saying “I paid $20 for groceries.” How cool is that? The app handles both group and friend expenses, and conveniently displays your total balance. We utilized the sentence-parsing API from our quick-add feature that our earliest adopters particularly love.

We started out with this:

And ended up with this:

Pulling off an Apple Watch in a few weeks is a testament to how hard we work at Splitwise, but we also know how to have fun! Also in my first month, we launched Splitwise Dance Edition during our annual April Fool’s Day Hackathon. For product testing, we danced in the office. We danced at a grocery store. And while playing pool.

There’s no shortage of good times at Splitwise, and we’re looking for more engineers to join us! If you want to take the lead on a cutting-edge project and fool-a-thons sound right up your alley, reach out to us at resume.black.hole@splitwise.com.