Splitwise for Android v3: New Design, New Love

The whole Splitwise team is proud and thrilled to announce the release of the most wonderful Android app we’ve ever designed – Splitwise Android v3. It’s a whole new look and the result of many months of toil by Marshall, with help in the last couple months from Ryan and Caleb. Testing was carried out by the whole team as well as volunteer testers from our user base, to whom we are very grateful.

To my thumbs and eyes, our Android app has gone from a source of embarrassment to one of the most polished productivity apps in the Play Store. Some highlights from the new build:

• Unified logo and color scheme and a look that embodies the Android style
• Pay friends via PayPal (for US users only)
• Simplified and streamlined “Add Bill” dialog
• Push notifications for new expenses and edits
• Sidebar menu to easily find balances with groups or people
• New friend view, including both group balances and private IOUs

What was most important to us is that the Android app look and feel like a best-in-class Android app, in the standard paradigm, with fast performance and the same behaviors as the Splitwise website. Version 3 is written from the ground up in native code, with standard Android UI patterns and fast scrolling. We’ve even open sourced some of our improvements to the “Add Bill” dialog, which required a Gmail-style Auto-complete.

To achieve consistency across platforms and get things closer to feature parity, we’ve put in many other features formerly only available on the website or iPhone app.

More new-to-Android features include:

• Editing of bills
• A more flexible add group dialog
• Deleting friendships from the app
• Quick-adding images from the phone camera
• The ability to view total balances across all groups and friends
• Toggling if a group uses “simplify debts” or not
• Improved invitations for groups, friends, and during expense creation

This has taken a long time, in part because most of our team was learning more about Android development along the way. But it’s been a good ride and we’re proud to have something worthy of the Splitwise name on the Android platform. As Splitwise’s biggest Android fan and the only member of the team using a non-Apple smartphone, I’m extremely happy.

While we’ve made significant strides towards feature completeness, there are a few features that are still only available on the website: shuffle debts, hiding of settled expenses, and the history tab. There’s certainly more to do and we’re not going to stop improving Android.

You can help by offering your feedback and volunteering to beta test future iterations. Drop us a line at support@splitwise.com.

After over two years of hard work, Splitwise remains a work in progress. We’re so glad you’ve come along for the ride. Android version 3.1, here we come.