It’s now almost April. We’ve been working hard on MoneyWell for a couple of months and thought it was probably time that we wrote something to update you on progress.
We took over MoneyWell at the start of the year. It took some time to get our heads around the app itself, the codebase and the support queue.
In that time we’ve put out several MoneyWell releases, we’ve migrated the website and support documentation to a new platform and we’ve responded to a lot of support requests – some going back nearly a year.
Sync progress
When we took over, we stated that one of our top priorities was restoring sync. After our initial releases, we’ve spent the last few weeks concentrating on that.
We’ve made some good progress, and we’ve made some decisions about the best way forward. We understand that not everyone will agree with our decisions – we haven’t taken any of them lightly, but based on research and what we think is best for the long term future of MoneyWell.
Here’s some things we’ve decided:
MoneyWell Cloud
MoneyWell will sync using our own cloud service.
Previously MoneyWell sync used Dropbox. Some people have asked if we could use iCloud instead. We evaluated both of those options but have decided that we’re not comfortable placing that much reliance on third parties:
Dropbox recently changed their terms so that their free tier will only allow 3 devices to sync. While this probably wouldn’t affect most people, for those with more devices, it would cause a problem – they’d have to upgrade to a paid Dropbox account or choose which devices to sync.
iCloud is a bit of a black box. Developing solutions using iCloud, when it works is great. Unfortunately, when it doesn’t, the available diagnostics that a developer can get access to try to figure out what has gone wrong are quite limited. We aren’t happy with these kind of compromises so have made the decision that MoneyWell should own its whole solution.
End-to-end Encryption
MoneyWell’s sync will continue to be end-to-end encrypted. This means, as previously, we will have no visibility into the contents of the files MoneyWell uses to sync, or your financial data. From a technical and support point of view this decision can make things a little more difficult for us, but we’ve heard those of you who have told us how important it is for you to be in (sole) control of your financial information.
When
The question everyone wants an answer to is “When will sync be released?”.
There’s still a while to go. We’ve made some good progress on sync, but sync (when implemented properly) is a major undertaking. Once we get to feature complete state, because of the critical nature of the sync and the fact that we want to keep your data safe and secure, we will undertake a long beta period. We’ll be starting off with a small number of testers and gradually expanding the list as things progress. Several of you have already expressed a willingness to participate, and we’ll be creating a MoneyWell beta mailing list for you to sign up to when we’re ready to start opening it up.
We don’t like not being able to give a date when syncing will be available. We understand that it’s painful for those of you that previously relied on syncing and we want to see it return as quickly as possible, but for something so fundamental to the future of MoneyWell, we aren’t prepared to compromise on quality or reliability. We need a robust system from which to build on going forward. We think that making promises that it turns out we can’t keep is worse than saying “we don’t know yet”.