Making household sharing work

Household sharing shipped in 1.3.2, and it did not work well enough. The six releases between then and now went almost entirely on fixing it. This entry covers all of them at once.

If you share a household, there is one thing worth doing after this update: open Settings → Household and tap Invite members once. Several of the fixes below only take full effect once the share itself is rebuilt, and that is what rebuilds it — for everyone already in the household, with nothing else to do.

The invitation was built wrong

From the first version, an invitation granted a share of nothing. Anyone you invited landed in an empty household, and everything they scanned or typed failed with "Something went wrong" — while your own side reported a clean, healthy sync the whole time. That is fixed. Re-inviting once repairs the share for the people already in it.

Changes from other people could go missing

Entries added by other household members could quietly fail to reach your device. Yours went out normally, so nothing looked wrong from where you were sitting. That is fixed, and the cause removed so it can't return. A separate limit that stopped a shared household pulling in more than the first few hundred entries is gone as well.

The app tells you when sync fails

It used to stay quiet. Now it says so. Update checks are also faster — the app reads only what has changed since the last check instead of re-reading everything — and tapping Sync now while a background sync was already running no longer freezes the app.

Who added what

An entry could show the wrong person as its author. Something a housemate scanned could read as "You" on your device, and "Member" was printed where a real name should be, because the label was decided by whoever created the entry rather than whoever was looking at it. Your device now works that out from your own point of view: a real name where it knows one, and "You" only for entries you actually added.

Foreign-currency receipts in a household

If you scanned a receipt in another currency, everyone else saw only the converted total — the original amount, the exchange rate, and where that rate came from never travelled with it. Now they do, so the same receipt reads the same way on every device.

Two privacy leaks, closed

Leaving a shared household could leave a trace of another member's name on an entry, which could resurface if that entry was later shared into a different household. And restoring a backup taken inside someone else's household could carry their name onto your ledger. Both are fixed.

A background crash on a locked iPhone

If Pennywick was syncing in the background while your phone was locked, it could close itself. You would rarely have noticed — it was already in the background — but the sync it was partway through had to start over later, so an entry from another device could take longer than it should to arrive.

The free transition, corrected

Pennywick went free on 27 August, a few days earlier than the previous version expected. That version worked out who had bought the app beforehand using the later date, so a handful of free downloads were briefly treated as earlier purchases and given Standard. This checks against the day the price actually changed. If you bought Pennywick at any point while it cost money, nothing changes for you — that is unlocked permanently and was never in question.

Nothing was lost in any of this

Every entry stayed on the device it was added on the whole time. None of these bugs deleted anything — they stopped things reaching other people — and that resolves itself the next time each device syncs.