Zoe Chaves

Splitwise: Dance Edition

I see you, Splitwise users. You are a bunch of party animals.

You incur a ton of shared expenses when you’re out on the town, from spotting a friend’s drink to sharing a cab home at the end of the night. As such, we owe it to you to optimize Splitwise for the freakin’ weekend.

That’s why we’re pumped to introduce ‘Splitwise Dance Edition’. A new Splitwise feature (available on all platforms!) that lets you add bills, payments and more by performing specific, funk-tastic dance moves with your phone in hand. Watch the video to learn more:

Introducing Passcode Lock for iPhone

Splitwise for iPhone v 3.3.4 allows users to protect their Splitwise data by adding a 4-digit passcode lock to the app.

To add a passcode, simply navigate to the ‘Settings’ screen (from the grey root menu) and tap ‘Passcode’.

The passcode will be stored locally on your device, meaning A) We’ll never receive or store it on our servers and B) You’ll have to re-enable passcode lock if you ever log out of the app and then log back in, or delete the app and then re-install it. This is because logging out / deleting the app ‘trashes’ info the app has just stored locally (same reason you shouldn’t log out if you’ve been using offline mode and have un-synched bills).

The lock will activate if you leave the Splitwise app for > 120 seconds. We chose this time frame because we figured people might routinely switch between Splitwise and a P2P app we don’t directly integrate with.

At Splitwise, we take user privacy very seriously and are excited to be offering this device-level protection. We hope to bring passcode lock to Android in the medium term future, too.

More ‘Split Unequally’ Options Added to Android

For the past 15 months, improving the Android app has been a huge focus for our entire engineering team.

Today we’re excited to announce that we’ve made another step towards feature parity: Splitwise for Android now offers split by exact amounts, percentages, shares, and adjustment. That’s one more ‘split unequally’ option than iPhone (which lacks split by adjustment still) and just one less than the website (we’ll probably never bring itemization to mobile, sorry!). We really love our Android community and feel awesome about finally offering them this functionality.

Splitwise for Android v 3.3.8 also includes a better integration with our help desk provider. Now, when you write out an email to our support team your text will be scanned for ‘common questions’. If it looks like your query could be answered by one of our existing knowledge base articles, you’ll be shown that article. You may, of course, still submit your email if you need further assistance. We love to hear from users and try to respond quickly and thoroughly.

Coming to Splitwise for Android: Offline mode, multiple payers

When we released Splitwise for Android v3 last November the whole team let out a sigh of relief: We no longer had an Android app that sucked, but rather a native, sleek beast we could all be proud of.

Seems like all our Android users breathed a sigh of relief, too — our average rating in the Google Play store climbed by .3 in a matter of days, and we got tons of excited emails, Tweets and blog comments from our long-suffering Android folk.

Today we’re pumped to announce that we’ve kept our Android-awesomeness momentum going. We released multiple payers a couple days ago (version 3.2.4), and offline mode is being beta-tested right now by some very kind community members. We’ll release it to the masses once we’ve slain all the bugs.

Our hearts do a little dance every step our Android app takes towards feature parity with web and iPhone. As always, we’re so grateful to have you (yes, you) along for the journey.

Take the leap to learn how co-founder and lead mobile dev Marshall got offline mode for Android up and running. Spoiler alert: It was hard.

Co-founder and lead mobile dev Marshall was inspired by Dropbox’s “incredibly helpful” dev blog posts on their Carousel and photo-sharing infrastructure. Their put-it-in-the-queue model is the foundation of how our offline mode for Android works.

Previously, the app was designed to communicate with the server each and every time a you made or edited a bill. In the absence of an internet connection that communication would simply fail.

Now, the app keeps a log of all changes made, and tries to push them to the server in the order they were committed. When you don’t have a connection the app can simply skip over anything it can’t immediately execute, intellegently saving it for later. The best part is it can do all this in the background, meaning you can add a bill and then immediately do some other task, like checking a balance with a friend, without being subjected to an annoying saving toast and lost seconds. This means that even if you never use offline mode for Android, you’ll now enjoy a better, faster add bill experience.

Conversely, our offline mode for iPhone still tries to save the expense on the server. Once the request has failed, the app marks the expense to be saved later. This still makes you sit through the saving screen, waiting for 30 seconds until the request times out.

About this new iPhone/Android difference Marshall was happy to note “this is the first case of our Android app having something significantly more awesome than iPhone”. We know it’s long over-due!

Marshall also lauds Path and the Robolectric testing platform as critical resources during this development cycle.

Drone Debt Collection In Partnership With Amazon And Square

The Splitwise team is excited to announce a new Settle Up option: Settle Up via drone. It’s the fastest, easiest way to collect money from your friends, no matter where they are. Plus, you’ll never need to have an awkward talk about repayment again — just send the drone and your friend will get the message that you need your money back, loud and clear.

How does it work?

If a friend owes you money, ‘Dispatch Drone’ will be an option in the Settle Up flow. Tapping ‘Dispatch Drone’ automatically deploys one of our payments-processing drones, stored in Amazon warehouses across the country. Geolocators built into your friend’s Splitwise app pinpoint their exact location, sending the drone in the right direction.

Splitwise collection Drones are equipped with Square Readers, and also take cash. As soon as your friend Settles Up with the drone, the payment is recorded in Splitwise and your balance updates accordingly. Our drones are adaptive and persistent; if your friend doesn’t have any money on them, the drone follows them around in a friendly, unobtrusive manner until they have their wallet on hand.

It’s been wonderful to collaborate with Amazon and Square on this project. We’re so glad these big companies share our commitment to eliminating money stress between friends. Stay tuned for the release of our Google Glass integration, which will project a balance onto your friends’ forehead if they owe you money.

Improvments to Splitwise Notifications

The team is happy announce the release of a broad set of improvements to how Splitwise notifications are generated and presented. Usability and ease-of-knowing-what’s-up are going to skyrocket thanks to an improved ‘Recent activity’ feed (now on mobile, too) and more sophisticated push notifications.

All 3 of our devs — Ryan, Marshall and Caleb — have been hard at work on this effort since December, when we introduced expense comments for the web and decided to really commit to building out notifications. Marshall and Caleb have focused on Android and iPhone respectively, with Ryan taking care of back end stuff, the web experience and overall look of the new features.

We made these changes to eliminate all possible sources of confusion when viewing Splitwise, because confusion causes uncertainty and stress! We’re waiting eagerly for your feedback on the changes, at feedback@splitwise.com.

Take the leap to see a more in-depth explanation of the changes.

Continue reading Improvments to Splitwise Notifications

Plates Listed as #1 Best New App in Apple App Store

Late last night, the team was delighted to discover that our dinner bill app Plates has been listed as the #1 Best New App in the Utilities section of the Apple App Store.

We released version 1 of Plates in July 2013 to great critical and popular success; both BusinessInsider and MSN Money covered the tool, and user reviews in the App Store have been overwhelmingly positive (average rating 4.5).

This latest recognition from Apple feels amazing, and confirms our belief that we’ve made a world class app to help friends avoid awkward conversations about money after enjoying a meal together (yuck). We’re tremendously proud of our intern Liz Neu, who built Plates with limited assistance from Caleb and Ryan and has been steadily shipping updates to the app while finishing up her final year of undergrad. Most recently, Liz optimized Plates for iPad (it’s currently listed as the #2 Best New Utility App for iPad as well).

We’re incredibly grateful to all the Splitwise users who have given Plates a whirl. We look forward to providing you with ever more, ever better solutions to all of life’s splitting problems.

Introducing Expense Comments on the Web

Splitwise wants to totally take the stress out of sharing expenses and creating IOUs with friends. A huge part of that is facilitating communication around who owes who, and for what. We’re always looking for new ways to help you and your friends get (and stay!) on the same page.

That’s why we’re so excited to announce the release of expense comments for the web. This new feature will let group members and friends have conversations within the web app around individual expenses. We plan to bring expense comments to our iPhone and Android apps in the New Year, so you can sort stuff out on-the-go, too.

To add a comment to an expense, click on the expense name in any expense list. In the expanded view you’ll now see a ‘Notes and Comments’ box with a ‘Post’ button beneath. Simply add your questions and thoughts to the box, hit ‘Post’, and await your buddy’s response! We’ve added an email notification setting for this feature; you can choose to get an email every time someone adds a comment to an expense you’re on, or you can opt-out. The default setting has you opted-out. Head to your account settings page (‘Your Account’) to toggle.

We’ve been wanting to build out a commenting feature for quite some time, and our support requests indicated lots of users wanted it, too. We hope to make it even more rich moving forward, while preserving the simplicity Splitwise is known for. We’d love to eventually introduce a full-blown messaging feature, so you can send messages in Splitwise not attached to any expense.

As always, we’re thrilled to be steadily improving Splitwise, and so grateful that you’re here for the journey. Happy holidays!

Improvements to Delete Friend Functionality

Late last week, Ryan made a much-needed improvement to Splitwise’s delete friend functionality. Now, you can delete any friend as long as they’re not in a group with you.

Previously, Splitwise blocked you from deleting friends if you had ever added an expense outside of a group with them AND another friend. This was happening because deleting friends deleted all expense records between you two, and Splitwise wanted to block multi-party records from being deleted in case one of the parties on the expense wasn’t all settled up yet. Ryan built a work-around that will enable you to delete the friends you want, without obliterating a piece of someone else’s balance puzzle.

Introducing Settle Up With Splitwise And Venmo

We’re excited to announce a payments integration you’ve been clamoring for: Splitwise and Venmo. As of today, iPhone users in the US will be able to directly settle up Splitwise debts using Venmo, as well as cash or PayPal.

Our goal has always been to include great, diverse payment options within Splitwise. Venmo was popularly requested in our user-fueled suggestion forums, and the folks at Venmo have provided a great new API and iPhone SDK to open their platform to us; it only seemed natural to use these developments as impetus to execute the often-requested integration.

Using Venmo within the Splitwise app works the same way as using Paypal. When you hit ‘Settle Up’, Venmo will be an option, joining the ‘Record a cash payment’ and ‘Pay with PayPal’ buttons.

Continue reading Introducing Settle Up With Splitwise And Venmo