Splync v1.4’s Summer Vacation — and the International Marriage Behind It

A funny thing about software — much like a marriage — is that no matter how carefully you test it, something unexpected always sneaks in. After releasing Splync v1.3, I discovered a couple of small bugs that could be critical. First, the keyboard pushed the footer upward, covering the email and password fields on the login and signup screens. This made it somewhat annoying for users to type. Then I noticed another issue: after a new user signed up and set their display name, the app didn’t navigate to the welcome page. The display name was saved on the server, but because the screen didn’t transition, it looked as if nothing had been stored. Both bugs were easy to fix, but their impact on new users could have been serious — someone trying Splync for the first time might have given up immediately. That’s why the v1.4 update arrived just a few days after the v1.3 launch.

In the very first blog post for Splync, I wrote about my engagement with my girlfriend. The idea for Splync originally came from our own relationship — money can quietly create tension, even between people who care well about each other. Whatever people say about money not being important, financial stress can still break a relationship. Splync was created to protect our shared life by giving us a simple, transparent way to track expenses together. In August, after the v1.4 update, we submitted our marriage registration to the city hall. Because it was an international marriage between India and Japan, we needed documents and support from her family back home. Our parents even traveled to visit us and accompany the submission. These family matters — combined with the Kafka-like legal procedures across two countries — took much of my attention. I could still have upgraded Splync, but I kept wondering: “What if I release a new version and an unexpected bug appears — and I can't secure enough time to focus on fixing it immediately?”

In fact, our India–Japan international marriage took almost a month to be accepted by the city, with multiple rounds of additional documents. Unfortunately, our original submission date could not become our legal anniversary. The city told us they needed to consult the local legal bureau to verify the validity of our papers, and then asked us for more documents — including an apostille that the Indian Ministry of External Affairs insisted they do not issue. When I called the legal bureau, they told me not to contact them directly and to go through the city hall. When I called the Indian Embassy in Tokyo, they said the decision should be made by the city. And again, the city said they must follow the legal bureau. It was pure Kafka. How absurd — a closed loop of institutions pointing fingers at each other while we stood helplessly in the middle. The final document we submitted was almost surreal: a self-declaration that neither of us was mentally incompetent nor suffering from any mental illness, and that we were not related within the prohibited degrees of kinship for marriage.

International matters are always tricky. The world simply isn’t straightforward yet. I write this blog in English as plain text and then auto-generate 42 HTML articles using Python and the OpenAI API. When I asked some of my foreign friends to do native checks on the versions in their own languages, their reactions were far more unexpected than I imagined. Some said, “I don’t understand.” I asked which part of the auto-translated articles was unclear — but it wasn’t about language at all. One said, “Why does a couple need to share expenses? They’re together.” Another said, “In my country, no one splits the bill at a restaurant. One person usually pays.” It was eye-opening to realize how differently cultures view shared expenses. Even within Japan, approaches vary widely. In older generations, it was natural for a man to pay 100% for a woman. But that’s not what I’ve been seeing in modern Japan. My girlfriend (now wife) and I split our expenses evenly. At the end of each month, we check the summary on Splync and settle the balance. That’s simply how we do it. Yet it seems I still need to listen to more people — because the ways people split expenses are more diverse than I thought.

It was around the time I was still struggling with the Kafka-like marriage procedures. One of my friends asked whether Splync could split expenses by 60:40, because that’s how she and her husband manage their finances. Unfortunately, the answer was “No.” Splync v1.4 could only split expenses evenly. To be honest, I had always considered custom ratios to be a lower-priority feature. But I didn’t want to lose potential Splync users simply because the app couldn’t support the way they preferred to split their expenses. I originally created Splync for myself, but it felt like the right time for the app to grow beyond my own needs. In those hectic days, I quietly decided to upgrade the app and enable customizable splits in Splync v1.5.