To Splitwise fans using Windows Phone 7.5 or 8, the last few weeks have been really exciting. Personally, I got so excited I purchased a Lumia 620 off of eBay just so I could keep up with these two new 3rd party releases. It won’t be my primary phone, but the Metro UI is very nice.
A few days ago, Centwise (created by Kamran Ayub) released its first version for both Windows Phone 7.5 and Windows Phone 8, making it the first third party app for long-time Windows Phone 7 fans! It’s a full featured app, with group support, simple IOUs, and lots of bells and whistles. Kamran is charging $1.29 to support his efforts, but it does have a free trial and a couple unique features I really like – including the sweet calculator-within-the-add bill flow pictured at right. Check out the full Centwise feature set here.
Miron adds groups to Splittr – with pics!
Miron has been keeping the awesome updates coming at free Splittr. The 1.1 release, which hit the app store yesterday, adds totally full-featured group support, so you can see all the expenses associated with a group, group balances, and repayment instructions. One neat idea is the ability to directly pin a group shortcut to the home screen. What a cool feature – I wish I had that on Android. I’m told a Windows Phone 7.5 version is submitted to the review queue as well. As of March 26th, Splittr now also supports Windows Phone 7.5, so all Windows Phone users should have two choices – a free and a paid app. Joy of joys!
Want Splitwise on Blackberry, Symbian, your toaster? Email developers@splitwise.com and we’d love to give you early API access. Personally, I can’t wait until we have an Arduino that creates Splitwise IOUs for the office coffee jar. :)
It’s my great pleasure to announce version 3 of Splitwise for iPhone and web, which Marshall has memorably code-named “Fat Rabbit.” This is a major new relaunch, which changes our look and feel and adds popularly requested features like expense search, offline mode, bill editing, and push notifications. Perhaps most notably, we’ve entered the world of “mobile payments” with iPhone payments via PayPal.
We have decided to relaunch Splitwise today, in spite of yesterday’s bombing of the Boston Marathon. We are deeply upset by the attack, and many dear friends of Splitwise were near the scene of the bombing or experienced a near miss. Our thoughts are out to anyone affected by the tragedy. In light of everything, we believe that the most ethical thing for Splitwise to do is to go ahead with business as usual.
If you care to, join us for a tour of the new app.
Layout
The first thing you’ll probably notice is the new color scheme and logo.
The New Splitwise Look And Feel
On the website, you’ll see we’ve switched to a three-column layout that displays the balances on the side and cleans up the top bar substantially. We think this looks a lot cleaner, and it allows the top bar to stay attached to the interface comfortably while scrolling. You can also now scroll the list of friends and groups along with the rest of the page.
The iPhone layout is extremely similar to this, except that the left-hand menu is compressed into the navigation tray that can be opened in the top left of the app.
PayPal on iPhone
On iPhone, you can now pay friends back anywhere using the “Send money via PayPal” feature. You’ll be presented a choice immediately after hitting the Settle Up button.
When we added “Pay via PayPal” to our website in September, we thought it sounded great (“I guess we do payments now too”) but weren’t sure anyone would actually use it. As it turns out, it has been a wonderful feature that we use at Splitwise ourselves quite frequently and users have been loving too.
For now, PayPal payments are limited to $500/wk in $USD for US users only. Of course, any user can make a payment via PayPal or Venmo or any other method and then record it in Splitwise. But the limits of the API permissions have kept us from going further than this for now.
PayPal handles the payments – once you log in and do your business, it will take you right back to our app.
Offline Mode
If you are going backpacking, travelling in a foreign country, or just live in an area with spotty reception, the new offline mode on iPhone is a game-changer. Not only is data cached in the app (so that you can see everything that happens while you are offline), new bills can also be added, even with new friends, and everything will be synched to the server when you do get internet access.
Bills that have not yet been synched will have a category icon that indicates that they are pending internet access. Even the balances update according to the unsyched expenses, unless there is a problem with the synchronization.
There are some limitations: you can’t create groups or invite friends without internet access. Friends you add indirectly (by including their email address in a bill) will get invited, but will only appear on the home screen once the app gets internet access. If there are any problems, dialogue boxes will guide you into editing the bill and resubmitting once you have internet access again.
Push Notifications
We’ll have our people push notify your people.
One frequently requested feature we are proud to start supporting is app push notifications for new expenses! No longer do you have to rely on email for updates about what is going on in your Splitwise account.
When you update to the new iPhone version, the app will prompt you and voilà! You can change push notification settings on the user settings page on either iPhone or the website.
Editing A Bill On The Phone
We realize it’s a little odd to tout this is a major new feature, but with all of the splitting possibilities available to our users, building that form has been somewhat of a challenge. We are happy to finally have it – woot!
Left Hand Menu
You can get to this menu by tapping the menu icon in the top left of the app.
It seems all the cool social networking kids are doing left hand side-bar menus hidden behind a tap, and after seeing how much simpler it made some aspects of navigation, we’ve joined the party. It’s especially useful for quick access to your groups and to get to the new “All Expenses” tab, which shows a list of all transactions.
Team Notes
While I have the pleasure of writing this blog post, it was of course a huge team accomplishment. Vast portions of Fat Rabbit were written by Caleb Oller, and Fat Rabbit’s high level of polish is in part a testament to his skills. The update to the Splitwise logo and color scheme were designed by the ever-talented Nicole Mercer, a friend and fellow Betaspring alumni.
Ryan, Marshall, and Caleb all worked together closely on both the website and mobile app, and it’s been by far our most collaborative release. As Splitwise’s token non-engineer, it’s been a pleasure to watch our engineering culture and process take shape as the team grows.
Plates by Splitwise: Dinner bill splitting for iPhone
We are excited to announce the launch of Plates by Splitwise. Plates is a beautiful, lightning-fast, free iPhone app that calculates who owes what after a group lunch or dinner.
The question of how to split a restaurant check has haunted society for generations. How many drinks did you have? Who shared those nachos? How much do I owe? Some people will want to pay for solely what they ate and drank, while others just want to split the bill equally to avoid talking about money and wrestling with mental math.
Plates navigates between these two camps and allows you to come to a fair solution quickly, so you can continue on with your awesome night out! The key breakthrough we’ve had with Plates is that the app allows you to itemize only the important differences between what each diner enjoyed, such as who drank that bottle of wine or who got the fancy shmancy dessert. This makes it super fast to calculate, because you don’t have to remember who ordered every last item.
A Splitwise account is not required to use Plates, but is very useful if after discovering that your buddy owes $12 towards the dinner bill, he discovers that he left his wallet at home. Plates is integrated with core Splitwise, so adding a Splitwise IOU is super fast.
Splitwise has always offered great tools for keeping track of bills with groups (apartments, trips, couples), keeping a “running total” of who owes who, and helping people settle up. However, until Plates, we’ve never had the perfect tool for handling complex dinner bills. We’re really psyched to be able to offer something for this specific yet common use case.
If you share a bill on Plates…
The way the integration with core Splitwise works is a quite open-ended at the moment, and could definitely still be improved. After you create a bill on Plates, you can share the bill via email or SMS. This generates a unique landing page for your bill which you can share with friends. From there, an individual share can be added as a Splitwise IOU, or the whole bill can be saved to Splitwise (with a link back to the landing page included).
Use the Plates landing page to input the correct amount into Splitwise
If you add an IOU with a specific person, things work very quickly. However, if you save the whole bill, we also do not assume any particular pattern of owing, because of the potential confusion over how much each person chipped in at the restaurant. Right now, clicking “Save to Splitwise” grabs the total, and links the expense back to the unique Plates page for that dinner.
Plates was developed by the talented Splitwise intern Liz Neu. Caleb, Ryan, and Jon pitched in as well. Many many friends contributed feedback – thank you!
In the future, we’re looking forward to porting Plates to Android, and making the Splitwise integration even tighter as we get more feedback from you about how it should work. If you have feedback about Plates or its Splitwise integration, feel free to put them in the comments here or send us an email at plates@splitwise.com.
The new home screen! The top row lets you filter by either debts, credits, or all friends.
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
Group balances are now shown within each friend’s page.
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:
You can find your groups in the sidebar or inside of your friendships that contain groups
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.
The new Add Bill dialog fits on one screen, and uses the Gmail-compose style for selecting who the bill is with
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.
If you want to switch from Buxfer to Splitwise, we’ve released an importer using their API.
In August 2012 we built an importer for Billmonk data as that service started to have problems. It helped a lot of their users seamlessly switch their expense histories and balances over to Splitwise, sparing them hours of re-entry and even worse, the horror of losing it all. We loved helping die-hard sharers find a new home, and it was a blast getting to know the Billmonk-turned-Splitwise community through the whopping 79 comments they left on our importer blog post.
We’re happy to now release an importer for Buxfer data, which we’ve developed in response to some observations about the service: The founding team appears to have moved on to Facebook, and there have been rather lengthy outages over the last year or so, with very spotty support throughout. It doesn’t seem that the site is going to close down anytime soon, but we wanted to give Buxfer users an easy way to turn over a new leaf if they felt so inclined.
If you’re a current Buxfer user and would like to get started with Splitwise, go import your Buxfer data! Or, keeping reading about the tool and co-founder Marshall’s development process below. The import process is reversible – there’s a link on the bottom of the import page that will remove all imported expenses, though invites that get sent as a result of the import will likely still go out.
The importer is not a completely smooth process yet. There were some details that I was unable to test well and need some user assistance to check. I do not attempt to import groups yet. We’ll import the bills, but not sort them into groups or add groups to Splitwise. I need a user with a lot of data and a couple of groups to get in touch with me to work the kinks out of that process; if that sounds like you, please contact me at support@splitwise.com.
I’m also unable to import recurring expenses and multi-payer properly. Recurring expenses will be imported, but it will no longer be recurring. You will need to manually edit the most recent copy of the recurring expense and add the recurring details.
Multi-payer expense are sometimes imported with different amounts for how much each person paid or owes, but the overall balance change is the same. For example:
Buxfer expense:
Lisa paid $20 and owes $15 (in total gets back $5)
Jon paid $10 and owes $15 (in total owes $5)
Splitwise expense:
Lisa paid $5 (in total gets back $5)
Jon owes $5 (in total owes $5)
Overall, the changes in balances are correct, but the information to get the paid and owed shares exactly the same is missing from the Buxfer exports.
There may be some other issues, so please send us an email at support@splitwise.com if you have any trouble importing your Buxfer data! We look forward to working with you and supporting you throughout the whole process. Welcome to Splitwise!
Take a peek: the population, land area, and population density of every zip-code / ZCTA in the USA.
2010 US Population Density, By Zip Code, in XLS and CSV
2007-2011 US Unemployment Rate By Zip Code, also in XLS or CSV
Unemployment and population density are probably two of the most important local statistics you might hear quoted about a city or town. Our US Population by Zip Code post from September has gotten rather popular, and a polite commenter requested population density and unemployment rate. So here they are, totally free and in the public domain, in two different formats (see above).
How did I get this data? Two different Census APIs (the Decennial Census 2010 and the ACS 5-year 2007-2011), combined with the square-footage by ZCTA listings from the 2013 U.S. Gazetteer Files.
I was planning to use this post to document my methods and send everyone on their own journey through the data, but it got too long and I realized that I wanted to talk a more systematic approach. In a follow up post, I will explain how to pull Census data yourself for different variables at different geographical resolution. But if you need a jump start now, my first and most helpful guide was the National Civic Day Of Hacking support slides.
Our dinner bill app Plates featured in the 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.
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?
Dispatch Drone
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.
Splitwise Drones are powered by the Amazon Prime Cloud, are equipped with Square Readers, and also accept Cash or Bitcoin
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.
On April 7th, a major web vulnerability called “Heartbleed” was disclosed to the internet. This vulnerability affected a popular security library called OpenSSL, and as a result it affected the security of a large number of sites on the internet, including Splitwise. (A good rundown of who was affected can be found here.)
Shortly after noon on April 8th, the bug was patched on all of our servers. We also issued a new SSL certificate for splitwise.com and initiated the expiration of our old SSL certificate. As a result, we are no longer vulnerable to Heartbleed.
We have no reason to believe that any Splitwise user data was compromised via the Heartbleed vulnerability or that we were the target of an attack, but we are continuing to monitor for any unusual behavior. In addition, we’ve taken this opportunity to implement a few additional security measures, to update passwords for important server components, and to generally review how we respond to security issues.
In summary:
1. The Heartbleed bug was patched shortly after 12pm EDT on Tuesday, April 8th. We issued new a SSL certificate a few hours later, and also revoked our old certificate.
2. As a precaution, we are logging out all users who visited the Splitwise website on April 7th and 8th.
3. Changing your password is recommended as a precaution, especially for users who logged in or created an account during the affected period. You can also log out of all your existing Splitwise sessions by clicking here.
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.
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:
Splitwise is proud to announce our Apple Watch app! The Watch app is an extremely easy way to share expenses and check your balance, without even pulling your phone out of your pocket.
The key feature of Splitwise for Apple Watch is the ability to dictate new expenses out loud. Splitwise can understand your natural English sentence, like “I owe Zoe $40 for dinner.” After you dictate, Splitwise turns the phrase or sentence into a Splitwise expense using the same technology from the “Quick-Add” feature.
To use the Watch app, you first select a group (or choose “No group”) using the digital crown. This sets the context so that you can add expenses more easily.
Then, you can dictate the expense details. This can be as simple as a description and an amount. “Groceries, $73″ will add an expense paid by you, and is assumed to be split equally with all members of that group. Or you can add an IOU with a specific person for any amount, by saying “I owe Ryan $20 for drinks,” which will add a $20 loan from a group member named Ryan with the description “Drinks.” You can refer to someone by their first name if they are in a group with you and their name is entered properly into Splitwise.
Here are some other kinds of phrases that Splitwise understands:
“I paid Marshall $50″
“Zoe owes me $15 for gluten free beer”
“Novall paid me $40″
Sample dictations like these are displayed on the screen before you launch the microphone, to help you remember how to use the feature. Feel free to experiment and have fun with dictations, because you will have an opportunity to confirm before it gets added to your group.
You can check your total balance on the home screen of the Splitwise watch app, and your total balance is also viewable using an Apple Watch “glance.” To enable the Splitwise glance, go to the Watch app on your iPhone and select Splitwise from the list of available glances. Apple does not allow our glance to appear on by default so you should enable it if it’s something you’d like.
Choose “Glances” from the Apple Watch App on your iPhone and then add SplitwiseAnd then add Splitwise to your list of Glances
And that’s pretty much it! It’s a simple app that we hope makes it easier to input expenses on the go.
The app is the brainchild of Novall Khan, Splitwise’s newest employee who joined us just over a month ago. Her leadership and energy meant that literally within weeks of joining we had a working prototype ready to go. We are thrilled to have her on board, and to have an app on the day of the Apple Watch’s public debut.
That said, this first version was created without an Apple Watch to try it out on (our pre-order just arrived). This is very much an experiment for us. Please, send us your Apple Watch feedback to feedback@splitwise.com – we’d love to hear about your experiences!
Update: Oh wow, we’re featured in the Apple Watch App Store. Hooray!
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.
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.
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 for Android v 3.6.5 introduces spending totals for groups. We’re thrilled about this for two reasons: one, totals have been our Android community’s most popularly requested feature for a while now. Two, it marks the first time our users are seeing Apoorv’s work in action! Apoorv Khatreja is Splitwise’s newest mobile engineer. He joined the team in October 2015 and is presently focusing on Android. We love having Apoorv on board and can’t think of a better way for our Android users to ‘meet’ him.
To access spending totals for your groups, navigate to the relevant group screen and tap the ‘vertical dots’ icon in the upper right hand corner of the group screen. Then tap ‘View spending totals’.
The resulting totals screen answers three important questions: How much did our group spend, in total? How much did I pay for, in total? And finally: How much do I owe, in total? You can see this information across three time periods: all time, this month, and last month. For now we are only summing across expenses added in your default currency. We recognize this may make the feature suboptimal for folks who are using Splitwise for foreign travel expenses. As a work-around for now you can temporarily change your default currency from your account settings screen.
Another enhancement introduced in 3.6.5 is the ability to zoom in on image uploads.
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.
Split by adjustment
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.
3D Touch: Peeking at a group
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.
1Password integration in Splitwise for iPhone
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 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.
This version introduces tabbed navigation, a Floating Action Button for “add bill”, and more!
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.
A new look
Material design is Google’s visual language for apps and websites. It proved fertile ground for some of the major visual changes introduced in this release.
A Floating Action Button (FAB) for “add bill”
The button that launches “add bill” is now a large, circular button that floats in the lower right hand corner of most screens in the app. User testing revealed that this change made the button easier to find, in part because many Android apps use the FAB to launch their primary action; we’re building off the muscle memory established by a whole ecosystem.
Group headers display the user’s total group balance, and convenient buttons to “Settle Up” and view all group “Balances”.
Tabs for friends, groups, recent activity
The core app architecture is now comprised of 3 tabs: friends, groups, and recent activity. Liberating these views from the sidebar has made them much more accessible. Users can swipe to switch between tabs, so it’s easy to change contexts quickly.
Group and friend headers
Each group and friend screen now has a large header that’s rich with information. When scrolling down the expense list on these screens, the avatar and name of the friend / group will slide slightly left as the large header collapses. This subtle animation helps users stay oriented while moving between various relationships.
Improvements to “add bill”
Increased discoverability
“Add bill” has always been a powerful form. Unfortunately, in previous versions of our Android app some important capabilities were obscured behind the keyboard. Splitwise 4.0 introduces a compact toolbar to the “add bill” form, so users can easily attach receipts and notes to bills, set bills to reoccur, and more. We also separated the currency symbol from the amount field and made it more clearly tappable, to make it obvious that users can add bills to Splitwise in any currency.
Two person bills
IOUs and “UOIs” are very common on Splitwise. We’ve tweaked the experience of adding a bill with a single friend to make it much easier to switch from “Paid by you and split equally” (the default for all new bills) to “I owe you the full amount” or “You owe me the full amount”. Speeding up core interactions by 2-3 taps is the stuff our dreams are made of.
“Add bill” success alerts
Too often, we watched users add a bill from the “Home” screen and then go hunt for it in their group or friendship to ensure it got added correctly. No more! Version 4.0 displays a small, self-dismissing alert once a bill is added successfully, eliminating the need for double-checking.
Faster balance-checking
Balance break-downs
Version 4.0 introduces a tab for groups and a tab for friends. We use this new real estate to display balance break-downs for each group and friendship. Balance break-downs make it easy to understand at a glance where that +$10 balance with Sarah really comes from: You owe them $50 for bills in the group”Las Vegas 2016″, while they owe you $60 for bills in the group “Our apartment”. We’re striving to eliminate all uncertainty around the question “Why do I owe what I owe?”
Hide settled friends and groups
We wanted the friend and group tabs to be full of information, but not cluttered. Towards this end, we implemented a feature that automatically hides groups and friends that have been all settled up for 30 days. To add hidden friends back to the view, scroll down to the bottom of the friends tab and tap “tap to show old settled friends”. Likewise for groups. This improvement ensures that the root views are showing only the freshest relationships, and makes them easier to scan.
Multi-currency balances
It’s become increasingly popular for users to add bills in multiple currencies. Version 4.0 does a great job of honoring this. The balance break-downs mentioned above will display multi-currency balances, as will the friend and group headers. The beloved “group totals” feature now displays spending totals across all currencies used in the group.
Splitwise has made great strides over the past year in regards to internationalization. With the help of our amazing volunteer translators, we’ve made the app available in Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. We’ve also introduced smarter behavior for new bills in multi-currency groups; on both mobile platforms, new group bills should default to the last currency used in the group (overriding the user’s account level default currency). This makes it easier to switch currencies for a trip without having to configure any explicit group-wide setting.
Splitwise Pro
Version 4.0 brings Splitwise Pro features to Android for the first time. Included in the feature set is “currency conversion” for groups. With one tap, Pro users can now convert all expenses in a group to their default currency based on the present day exchange rate. Another Pro feature introduced in this release is “Search”, which will work across all expenses and payments in an account. An empty search also works as an “All Expenses” tab, which we have de-emphasized in this release.
The beta group for this release was primarily comprised of Pro users. We’re so grateful for their support and passion for Splitwise. To update to Splitwise Pro, log into the web app and then navigate to “Account Settings“.
Thank you + Feedback
The whole Splitwise team is tremendously thankful to our whole user base: thank you for sending us your praise, gripes, feature ideas, bug reports, and random GIFs. Knowing that you use Splitwise to keep stress out of your most important relationships gets us up in the morning. If you have any feedback on “Hefty Otter” or any aspect of Splitwise, please reach out to us at support@splitwise.com. We read every email we get any try to respond within 48 hours.
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 ”)
Balance break-downs 
input.
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in a big way. Starting today, the Splitwise web app will be 
comprised of emojis. Before switching over to emoji mode, 
these 
terms:
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, see you soon!”)
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you and that’s no joke.
