Split bills with friends, track your own spending

Install it from Google Play on an Android phone: search for Splitmate in the Play Store, or use the button at the top of this page. It is free, and Play installs and updates it the same way it does any other app. There is nothing to download from this site. That is the Android app, and it is the only one there is: there is no iPhone or iPad app, and none is planned. The next answer is what to do instead.

Yes, in a browser — though there is no iPhone app and none is planned, so it is a different thing rather than the same one. The web client is at web.splitmate.quizuncle.com, and it works on an iPhone today: Google sign-in on iOS Safari is the way in. It has your groups, plus a view-only Me tab, and that is a statement about what it can change rather than a list of screens it is missing: everything you can add or change there hangs off a group you are already in — its expenses and splits, settling up, its members and its own chat — and it shows each group’s balances and spending charts too. Your own Just-me expenses are view-only in the browser: you log them on an Android phone, and if that phone has the optional backup turned on, the Me tab reads it to show them to you beside your share of the expenses in the groups you are in. A group you have left, been removed from, or that someone deleted is not there, so its month total can be lower than the phone’s. Signing in with Google is required, because a browser cannot hold the anonymous install identity the Android app uses. Chat in the browser has no outbox, so a message that fails to send comes back into the box for you to try again rather than waiting to go later. Without a connection it still shows your groups and balances, and expenses or payments you add go out once you are back; chat, creating a group, joining one, and editing or deleting an expense need a connection. Everything else is shared: a group you join in the web app is the same group on the phone, the moment that phone is signed in to the same Google account. There are no recovery codes and no device transfer to set up, because the account is your Google account and signing in again is the whole of it. The one thing that does not travel is the Activity feed: the phone keeps its own in a table on the device that is never synced, so a second client has nothing to fetch and works out its own from your groups instead — which is why what you have already read on one of them does not carry to the other. Add the page to your home screen and it gets its own icon and opens with no browser chrome around it. That is as close to an app as it gets, and there is no iPhone app to install instead. It is also the only way to be notified about anything on an iPhone, which the next answer walks through step by step.

Because on an iPhone a notification has nowhere to arrive until Splitmate is sitting on your Home Screen. There is no iPhone app, so Splitmate runs in a browser there, as the web app, which needs Google sign-in — and Apple delivers a web notification to a page that has been added to the Home Screen and to nothing else. A Safari tab never gets one, and has no switch to turn on. So, in this order: open web.splitmate.quizuncle.com in Safari; tap the Share button and choose Add to Home Screen; open Splitmate from the new Home Screen icon rather than from Safari; then open the Me tab, press the ⚙ for Settings and, under Notifications, tap Push notifications, then Turn on notifications. The browser asks you to allow it at that point and never before — nothing prompts you when the page loads. Expect one thing on the way: the Home Screen copy keeps its own storage, so signing in with Google there is a separate sign-in from the one in Safari, and it is the same web app in every other way. On Android, and in a desktop browser, none of that applies: an ordinary tab can be notified, and the switch is in the same place. What arrives is a notification when somebody in one of your groups adds an expense, records a payment, sends a message, nudges you, comments on an expense you added, paid for or commented on, or leaves the group — and tapping it opens what it is about: the expense, the payment, that group’s chat, its balances, or, when someone leaves, the group itself.

A choice of five ways in. Continue with Google takes your name and profile picture from your Google account — skipping straight to picking a currency when it can — and you can replace the picture later from your profile; Just use a name skips Google and asks for a name yourself. Underneath those, if you have used Splitmate before, three more rows bring your groups back: Restore with Google, Enter a recovery code, or Scan from your old phone. Every page after the first has a Back button, so a wrong tap costs nothing.

Yes, and there is nothing to unlock later. The app contains no billing code at all, so there is no paid tier it could sell you even if we wanted one, and no way for it to take a payment. It carries no advertising either, and no ad SDK of any kind.

Not for the Android app. There is no signup, no email address, no password and no phone number, and there is no user directory, so nobody can look you up or find you by name. Splitmate does create an anonymous Firebase identity on first launch, because the server needs something to check when it decides which groups your device may read, but nothing about you is attached to it. Signing in with Google is optional there and does exactly one thing: it ties that identity to your Google account so your groups and chats come back after a reinstall. The web client is the exception, and the only one: signing in with Google is required in the browser, because there is no install for an anonymous identity to belong to.

The app puts it in six words: works offline, groups sync to the cloud. Your personal ledger, and any group you have already synced, stay readable and editable with no connection at all, because everything is written to a database on the phone first. Joining a group, push notifications, adding a receipt photo for every member of the group to see, comments and nudges need the network: joining, receipts, comments and nudges say so and ask you to try again. A group you create, and chat messages, wait and go out once you are connected. The web app, which you sign in to with Google, is narrower: your groups and balances stay readable without a connection, and new expenses or payments you add there sync once you are back, but sending a message, creating a group, joining one, and editing or deleting an existing expense still need a connection.

Groups; your personal ledger only if you turn on its backup; and a little telemetry from the Android app. When you create or join a group, its expenses, its member names and profile pictures, its settlements, its chat, its edit history, and the receipt photos and comments every member of it can see sync to a Google Realtime Database in Singapore, along with one push token for your device. Expenses you log as Just me stay on the phone unless you turn on Back up your personal expenses in Settings; that switch starts off, and turning it on copies them to a private area of the same database, readable by you alone. The Android app also sends Google seven analytics events, none carrying an amount, a name or anything you typed, and a crash report when it fails. There is no advertising SDK, and the advertising ID is not collected.

Not in the way a secure messenger means it, and this is worth reading twice. Messages travel over an encrypted connection and sit behind server-side rules that decide who is allowed to open a thread, but they are stored as ordinary text, which means we could read them if we looked. They are not end-to-end encrypted. The push notification a new message triggers carries the message text in its body as well, so it passes through Google’s notification service on its way to whatever the other person has signed in on. Treat a Splitmate chat the way you would treat an ordinary group chat, and not the way you would treat a private one. The same is true of comments on an expense and of receipt photos: every member of the group can see them, and they are stored in a form we can read.

No. Splitmate never moves money. Settling up records a row saying that a payment happened: who paid whom, how much, and whether the method was Cash, UPI or Other. Nothing is transferred, nothing is charged, there is no card on file and there is no connection to your bank. The nearest it comes is Pay via UPI, and Splitmate still only records what you tell it: if you owe someone in a rupee group and you have saved their UPI ID on your phone or in the web app you sign in to with Google, it opens your own UPI app with their ID and the amount filled in. You pay there, or not; Splitmate cannot see which, so it asks whether you paid and records nothing until you say yes. Asking for money works two ways. Remind writes a message and hands it to your Android share sheet, so you send it yourself. Send a nudge is different: Splitmate’s server sends that person a notification saying how much you are asking for, at most once per person per group per day.

Two ways. The Activity tab is one feed across every group at once, not a screen inside any single group — expenses, settlements, chat messages and membership changes, newest first, grouped by month and then by which group each one belongs to. A row about money renders as a tinted card with a category icon and the amount; a chat message or someone joining or leaving is a plain line with neither. Filter by type, category or person, in any combination, and tap a row to jump straight to the group or thread it came from. Inside a group, what other people added since you last opened it on that phone is marked New, and what they changed is marked Edited by them; the group’s history keeps who changed what, and when. Separately, Splitmate pushes a notification the moment someone adds an expense — who added it and how much, for instance "Meera added Scooter Rental" with "₹1,200.00 in Goa Trip" underneath — and tapping it opens that expense, not just the group.

You can give a group a settlement deadline, an amount you are willing to be owed before you want nudging, or both. Anyone who is still short then gets a reminder on their own phone: a local Android notification the app schedules itself, not a message anyone sends them. You pick the cadence, which is every four hours, daily, every two days, weekly, or a number of hours you choose with a floor of four. Nothing arrives between ten at night and eight in the morning. Two buttons on a settle-up are separate things entirely. Remind composes a message and opens your share sheet, and whether it ever gets sent is up to you. Send a nudge asks Splitmate’s server to notify that person, once per person per group per day.

Because turning it off would be the loophole. The settlement settings go read-only for you once two things are true at the same time: you owe money in that group, and a trigger is already live, meaning either the deadline has passed or what you owe is over the limit that was set. Raising a threshold is exactly as easy as deleting a deadline, so both arms lock together or neither does. While it is locked the sheet shows what you owe and a way through to the balances, and nothing else. Settle up, or drop back under the limit, and it is an ordinary editable form again. Everyone else in the group can still edit it; the lock is only ever on the person who owes.

Yes, if the group turns it on, and nothing is ever converted. Splitmate carries no exchange rates, never fetches one, and never adds amounts in different currencies together. A group starts with one currency; anyone in it can switch on Allow expenses in other currencies, and from then on each expense or payment keeps its own currency, and balances, settling up and totals are kept per currency, shown side by side, like ₹1,240 · $35. A payment settles one currency at a time. Everyone in the group needs the latest version first: an older version shows wrong balances for expenses in another currency, and the app warns you of exactly that before you switch it on. Nudges and a group’s Analysis tab work in the group’s own currency only. The same rule applies across groups: the running total at the top of the Groups tab only appears when everything you owe and are owed is in one currency, and otherwise it shows how many groups you have instead. You can choose from over 40 currencies.

Both, and they are separate settings. Open this group at startup, on a group’s own menu, pins that one group so Splitmate lands straight on it every time you launch the app; leave nothing pinned and it reopens on whichever tab you last had open instead. Motion is unrelated: Settings → Appearance → Motion offers System default, Reduce motion or Always animate, and it applies on top of — not only when — your phone’s own Reduce motion setting is on.

Every member of the group, and anyone who joins with its invite code. The code is the permission: that is what makes joining a group as simple as scanning a QR, and it is also why the code is worth treating like a door key and only handing to people you actually want in. A link you share or copy, or a group you create in the web app after signing in with Google, works for 30 days from then, and sharing or copying it again gives it another 30. A group created on the phone whose link nobody has shared or copied yet (one only ever shown as an invite QR code, say) has no deadline. The code itself never changes. Everything in a group is visible to every member of it, including receipt photos, comments and the history of every edit. Removing someone stops them appearing in balances and stops them being included in new splits. It does not reach into their phone, so the device they already joined on keeps the copy it has until they leave the group themselves.

Settings has a Backup & recovery section for exactly this, with two ways to prepare: link your Google account, or set up a recovery code and keep it somewhere safe. Either one works later from the new phone’s own onboarding screen, under Restore with Google or Enter a recovery code. With both phones in hand at once, Move to a new phone is quicker: it shows a one-time code good for ten minutes, and the new phone reads it under Scan from your old phone. Whichever route you take, your groups and chats come back. Expenses you logged as Just me come back only if you had turned on Back up your personal expenses in the same section; leave that off and they never left the old phone, so there is nothing to restore them from.

Everything held on the phone goes with it, and that includes the expenses you logged as Just me, which exist nowhere else unless you turned on the optional backup. Without it, uninstalling is how you delete those, and it cannot be undone. Groups behave differently, because they live on the server too: the other members keep the group, its expenses, its chat, and the receipt photos and comments shared with the group, exactly as they were. If you had linked Google or set up a recovery code before uninstalling, reinstalling and using either one brings your groups and chats back, and your personal ledger too if it was backed up. Deleting your account from Settings before you uninstall removes your identity and your backup from the server; having your name and profile picture taken off a group you were in is a separate request, and the data deletion page explains both.