Welcome back to the Lunch Money Community Spotlight!
Before we get to this month’s spotlight, we wanted to thank everyone who participated in the User Feedback Survey. One thing that popped out was that over 75% of the respondents indicated they were interested in learning more about third-party plug-ins, tools or apps. That’s what this newsletter is all about!
Our July Community Spotlight is on Rodrigo Martins, the creator of the Lunch Money Companion for Android.
Q: Hi Rodrigo. Can you share a bit about when you first started using Lunch Money?
I started using Lunch Money around 2023. Before that, I used services like Mint and YNAB, but they didn’t quite solve my problem of visualizing where my money was going and budgeting better. A quick Google search led me to Lunch Money, which stood out because it supports multiple currencies—a crucial feature for me as an immigrant with money in different currencies at the time.
Q: You’ve built an Android app called Lunch Money Companion. What was behind your decision to create it?
As an Android software engineer, I wasn’t feeling creatively challenged at work, so I channeled my ideas into a new application. I always wanted a way to access Lunch Money on the go, but I wasn’t happy with the mobile website, which doesn’t offer a responsive layout. Within a few weeks, I had the first version of Lunch Money Companion. The positive outcome motivated me to publish it on the Play Store and expand it with more features.
Q: Did you always plan to share the Lunch Money Companion with other Lunch Money users?
Initially, I didn’t plan to share it since it was a proof of concept to solve my own problems. However, the solid result made me realize it could also help other users. Given my passion for supporting the open source community, it felt like a great opportunity to contribute.
Q: If users decide to use your service, how can they feel confident that you securely manage their API Tokens and the information you can access with them?
All information, including API tokens and authenticated user data, is stored locally on the user’s device using Android’s encrypted preferences mechanism. Only the locally running Lunch Money Companion app has access to this information. We use it primarily for display purposes on the settings screen or to make API calls to the Lunch Money service.
In addition, all the code is available on GitHub for anyone to audit, and I have no intention of adding tracking or data collection features. The only SDK in use is for crash tracking to monitor and fix any issues in production.
Q: Is there anything you’d like to ask the Lunch Money user community for?
Feedback and contributions in any form are very welcome. Until recently, I was the only one using the beta version of the app to ensure it worked properly before release. As the app has matured, I want to include more users in the beta testing phase.
Thanks Rodrigo for this is a fantastic addition to the ecosystem of Lunch Money community-developed applications! If you’re interested, here’s how to get involved:
- Android users can find the Lunch Money Companion in the app in the Google Play Store.
- You can examine the source code, open issues, or even contribute to the project by visiting Rodrigo’s repo on Github.
- Join the #android-lm-companion channel in our Discord community to chat directly with Rodrigo and other developers/users of the app.
Developer API for non-technical folks
If you find yourself wondering exactly what a developer API is and how it’s enabling so many community-driven apps, tools and plug-ins, we’ve written an article just for you!
Do you have a Community Story?
We’d love to feature more members of our community in this newsletter. Have you developed an app, plug-in or tool that you want to share? Please reach out to jp@lunchmoney.app!
Even if you aren’t a developer, if you have ideas on how we can make it easier for users to take advantage of contributions from the developer community, I’d love to hear from you.
