Most of us use their credit cards, debit cards or linked bank accounts to make payments for our purchases online or offline. These cards or accounts are generally linked to your mobile number on which you receive a sms notification by the bank. This is a healthy practise by banks to keep the consumers intimated about their expenditures. I don’t know how many of you will agree to this but you tend to spend more when you have use virtual money rather than actual cash in your daily routine. This creates a need for an expense tracker where we could manage and observe our spending pattern. Hopefully, this might help controlling one’s expenses or if not atleast manage it well.
We have been using Expense Manager by ThumbWorks for managing our expenses manually entering everything until I learned about Walnut. This application (on my Android smartphone) handled my manual overhead on its own in their workflow. Since then, we have been liking it better in terms of overall experience.
Features
The mobile application is build upon the latest Material Design UI guidelines giving it a fresh look. Walnut’s whole idea is to eliminate the manual effort and be responsible for managing the expenses on its own automagically.
The application intelligently scans your text messages for bank alerts, promotional offers or any biz messages and catgorises them in the layout. The best part about it being useful from Day 1 already having a backup of your history from the time you have been receiving those alerts. ThumbWorks has mentioned in its faqs on their website that privacy of the users is being respected no matter if they use it app or not. The app does not read any personal messages or upload any kind of sensitive data anywhere. You can add tags, or manual inputs to the entries helping yourself for better identification.
The application currently is available only on Android as a free download on the Google Play Store. The application supports Android 4.0 and above and have already reached 50,000-100,000 download category.
Conclusion
Today in the smartphone arena, its the app which makes a better smartphone for the end consumer while the OEMs, handset manufacturers or the operating system provides the developers a platform to evolve this technology rapidly. Talking about this specific application, it is a one of the must have utility for smartphone users. Walnut automatically handling the data and converting into useful information with visually appealing results. The app does not require any bank data neither it asks for any such thing. The app reads your text messages and builds it own representation format. It even tracks your ATM withdrawls as well that by the end of the month shall help with the analysis phase.
We like the app very much hence we will giving it 4.5/5. It still requires more bank support to be integrated in order to make it a viable download across different regions.
Download link – Google Play Store
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Totally worth it
Will walnut reads our OTP PASSWORD sent to our mobiles via text messages?
Thanks,
Praveen Bindla
Hi Praveen
Although the developer could better answer this question, but as far as our observation goes this does not happen.
Hans, can u pls share ur views on others apps in this category ie smatspends and finart
What is risk?
No it does not
One way to test the security of this app is to turn off mobile data / wifi and check of it still functions as usual. This way we know it doesn’t need server access for its calculations
Yes better install a network firewall app in the android and give zero network access to the walnut app. This make sure it doesnot upload your financial status to third party servers.
Very true vishnuu, security of data is important, btw i think now there r more apps which work automatically and have offline mode ie smartspends , finart etc
Am already using 2 other apps in this category – moneyview and finart, is there any special feature in walnut which is not available in these 2 apps? Moneyview has lot of features and finart is very secure, so keeping both for now.
App is good no doubt but question in mind is app is safe?? How could we trust
Try Finart or smartspend, they have offline mode feature, so u may find these more safe
Is walnut is safe and secure. Is Walnut read the otp mssg send by bank??
Whether walnut is hack free app ??
Whether walnut can be used only in offline ??
How do we know that walnut is not sharing our OTP’s and data’s to other servers??
App is really User friendly, only concerns are above raised doubts for security purpose !!
Hack Free app?? None of the apps are hack free. If they are strong today, then an exploit may be created tomorrow which can create a void and all your personal data may be stolen.
There is a popular quote.
“If Internet offers you a free new service which is totally free then the data you store in it is more valuable than the service itself and your data is their(app vendor’s) product.”
I am shocked. It has detailsof my swiping of debit card, all bank details of friends, relatives for whom i transferred. It captures all messages linked to my mobile number. It even save them aside.
I switched off internet. Data was still available.
Uninstalling app.
Even if you uninstall it, the data is saved in their server. If you clear all your sms(from sms only walnut builds your spends) and install walnut in a later time, walnut brings yours previous spends from its server(the sms you already deleted). I was surprized by doing this.