Splitwise Android 2.5: Halfway to Awesome Town

Hello wonderful Android users!

You’ve been very patient as we’ve toiled to bring our Android app up to speed with the iPhone app in features and stability.

So, we’re incredibly excited to announce the release of a new version of the Splitwise for Android app. Most of the changes in this version are under the covers – the app is much faster and less buggy now. Admittedly it still looks like a copy of the iPhone app, but we’re going to work to change that over the next few months. This release is just the start of our path towards Android excellence, and we couldn’t be happier about showing you Droid users some love. Read more about the tip of the iceberg below the fold! 

The biggest improvement is a speedier launch time. We decided you’d much rather start using the app than see the launch screen, let alone stare at our logo for a couple of seconds while the old data backend was initialized. For those of you with older phones, this was taking 10-15 seconds and would sometimes crash the app. With the new version, you’ll wait no more! You’ll be able to start using the app almost immediately after launching it, and launch crashes are way down.

We’ve fixed a number of issues with multiple currencies. For as long as we’ve had an Android app, it just added up the totals for all currencies instead of keeping separate totals. In this version, though you won’t yet be able to see all the balances, we’ll show you the largest outstanding balance and add a * if you have balances in more than one currency.

If you’re using groups, we show the breakdown of your balances in more detail and you can actually see balances in multiple currencies. This screen in particular represents the aesthetic we’re moving towards here on out – a clean interface, beautiful colors and a more Android-centric design and feel.

The expense list is much more delightful in the new version. We’ve got fancy category icons, a super clean design and pretty colors for you to enjoy. It also shows a much more useful balance on the right. We now show the piece of the expense you owe/are owed, instead of the total cost of the expense. This means you can add up all the numbers on the right of the expenses and get the total balance you see at the top of the friend view, if you or your friends want to double-check our math.

And of course, there are some bug-fixes for common problems. If you’ve been unfortunate enough to be cursed by the double expense bug or the undeleteable expense bug, we’ve had some local magicians in to rid us of these problems. There are some other bug-fixes in there as well, but we didn’t have to bless our code to fix those ones.

We’re really excited to bring you this new version, and about the Android work ahead of us. It’ll be another major release or two before we get the app up to snuff with web and iOS, but we know we’ll get them out soon! In the meanwhile, enjoy using this faster, stabler version and please pass along any feedback you may have on it.

Cheers,

Marshall, Jon, Ryan, Caleb, Zoe, Liz and Will