Mere hours ago, Apple approved version 2.5 of Splitwise for iPhone. We weren’t expecting this to get through the review queue before the holidays, but lo and behold, we’re here!
As we described in the version 2.5 web preview Ryan and Jon just posted, we’ve been trying to make Splitwise continuously more simple and delightful as we release new versions. This is just the beginning, but we’d love to get your feedback, either here, at our dedicated feedback site http://feedback.splitwise.com, or email us via support@splitwise.com.
The iPhone app started in this release cycle with fewer structural issues than the website – it’s already simpler to use, faster to add bills across friendships, and easier to view everything in one place. But we really wanted to add the visual feedback of category icons to the mobile experience (see image right). We think this makes it more fun! The iPhone app also auto-categorizes expenses now, just like the web version.
As you can see in the screenshot, we also (finally) differentiated payments visually from IOUs and expenses – something we have done since version 1.0 on the web version of Splitwise.
We also made some improvements to the expense details view, which was quite an ugly screen in the previous iPhone version of Splitwise. We’re not sure if we’ll keep the “spotted” wording or not (to explain who owes who), but in general we are trying to improve the tense of the verbs so that it’s clear what has gone one with old expenses. More to come on this in version 3.0.
As always, we welcome and encourage feedback on these visual improvements!
The new ways of viewing “friends/groups” data will first be available on the web version of Splitwise, and is not in this iPhone release – it will take us until version 3.0 to harmonize this approach across iPhone and the website.
What about our poor Android users? As Splitwise’s most loyal Android fan, Jon sympathizes. Android users will have to wait a bit longer for these snazzy interface improvements. Developing for Android is more difficult and more expensive than developing for iPhone, in part because there are so many different devices to test on. Splitwise is still a small team, and we are more experienced in iPhone development.
Marshall has been hard at work releasing rapid bug-fixes to Android – the crash rate is now half the rate it was in August, after much hard work and re-writing. If you are a great Android developer yourself, and are passionate about making Splitwise’s Android app kick butt, please send us an email at resume.black.hole@splitwise.com – we’re hiring!
– Jon and Marshall
The Splitwise Blog 
Please add that we can add € with comma separation!!
we write 10,99 not 10.99 … THANKS! decimals places are not possible on my 4s right now );
Hi! I missed this comment. It should generally be possible to use , if your phone is set in a locale that uses , instead of . and it should also display everything correctly now as well.
Marshall
Hi ,
Is there any chance you are looking at Windows phone 8 app too ?
I am thinking of moving to wp8 from my android phone but miss a lot of apps including yours.
Regards,
Sanjay
Hi @Sanjay,
We’re not planning on building a Windows Phone 8 client ourselves – as you can probably tell by how apologetic I am in these posts, developing for 3 platforms is exhausting enough.
BUT we have heard rumors of a pretty great 3rd party client made by a big Splitwise fan, based on our API. When / if it comes out, we will definitely write here on the blog about it.
Cheers,
Jon