Getting it, and getting unstuck

Both phones need the network for a change to cross between them, and either end can be the one that is missing it. The Groups tab is where to look: a group that is syncing says so on its own card, reading Syncing live when the connection is up and Sync paused (offline) when the phone is holding your changes locally until it is back. Yours can be live while theirs is not, so it is worth checking both. Once both ends are live the expense arrives on its own, and nothing is lost in the meantime — a change made while a phone is offline is kept and sent when it reconnects.

On an iPhone this is almost always one thing, and it is not a fault: 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. In a Safari tab there is nothing to switch on at all, so the feature looks broken when it is really not reachable yet. It is the same web app either way: your groups, plus a view-only Me tab. Open web.splitmate.quizuncle.com in Safari, tap the Share button, choose Add to Home Screen, then open Splitmate from that new icon and turn notifications on inside it, from Settings (the ⚙ on the Me tab), under Push notifications. That Home Screen copy keeps its own storage, so it asks you to sign in with Google again. On Android, and in a desktop browser, an ordinary tab is enough and no icon is needed. If you have allowed notifications and they still do not arrive, the likely cause is that they were turned down at some point: a site cannot ask a second time once it has been refused, and the way back is through the browser’s own notification settings, where Splitmate can be allowed again. Private and incognito windows usually block the background helper notifications need, so they do not work there either.

If you signed in with Google before you left the old phone, install Splitmate on the new one and tap Restore with Google on the welcome screen. Your groups and their chats come back, because those live on the server as well as on the phone. Your personal ledger comes back only if you had turned on Back up your personal expenses: that switch starts off, and with it off, expenses you logged as Just me never leave the phone unless you back them up, so there is no copy anywhere for a restore to fetch. If you have not signed in with Google yet, do it before you change phones, from Settings, under Backup & recovery.

Removal in Splitmate is narrower than the word sounds, and the app says so in its own dialog: you stop appearing in that group’s balances and you stop being included in new splits. That is the whole of it. It does not reach into your phone, so the copy of the group your device already holds stays where it is until you leave the group yourself. If you are the one doing the removing, the same thing applies in reverse: the button takes someone out of the maths, and it does not take back what their device already has. Neither the app nor the browser lets you remove someone who still owes money or is still owed it — settle up first.

That is the lock, and it is deliberate rather than a fault. The settings go read-only for one person at a time, and only when two things are true at once: 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. Both arms lock together, because raising a threshold is exactly as easy as deleting a deadline, and silencing a reminder by editing the trigger away is the loophole the lock exists to close. 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 while you are locked.