Reckoner Update February 2024

So I kicked in the new year by being extremely busy and delaying transitioning my own financial tracking to Reckoner. When I did, I found all the issues I didn’t find before and released a flurry of fixes!

🚢 Releases

There were soo many releases this past month. This has been exclusively bug fixes after using Reckoner full time. The first few releases were necessary fixes due to last minute changes. The remaining fixes all center around device synchronization and support for Linux application stores.

In the device synchronization fixes, there were a lot of changes to speed up startup synchronization and sequencing futures. In short, I changed it so that the save of new data items didn’t wait on uploading to the sync service. Additionally startup sync was greatly improved by not awaiting each future when created and only awaiting them when they needed to complete before performing the next step.

Finally, Reckoner is not available as a flatpak and snap! I will say it was harder to setup the flatpak than it was the snap, but I think that can be attributed to the more rigid review of the application submission process. I have updated the Reckoner website to add installation instructions.

While the number of these fixes may seem bad, there is one bright sign I found in all of this. I did not need to modify my database model at all! This is what I was most concerned about and am glad to see that my focus on that paid off! Nearly all of the issues were usability and speed improvements with only one or two core issues. I am also glad that I added support for regular database backups! I would highly encourage anyone using Reckoner to use it on an Android/Linux device and enable regular backups.

📚️ Documentation

The documentation website had no love this month. I think it will become a necessary thing to complete before releasing to Google Play as then I would get a lot of non-technical users. I hope to spend more time this month on it, but make no guarantees.

📱 Application Store Releases

Besides sync, I am focusing on making Reckoner available.

🐧 Linux

It’s done! I ended up swapping flutter_secure_storage with biometric_storage. I now consider the flutter_secure_storage issue instructing uses to not use Flutter snap to just be a cop-out from them. What’s stranger is that they have instructions on their read me to configure for snapcraft; even though build with their dependency fails on snapcraft.

🤖 Android

I have started the process of getting a Google Play account. I have paused the process as it was clear I couldn’t do this and fix issue and get the Linux stores released. I chose to prioritize the Linux release and will now continue the work to get Reckoner in the Android application stores.

I have a goal of completing my developer account for Google Play. Besides that I am also going submit Reckoner for inclusion in the F-Droid main repo. One of the aspects I need to consider is whether I am going to support reproducible builds. If I choose to go this route, it will probably take up all of my time this month.

🪟 Windows

I haven’t started on this and won’t until I have finished with the Android releases. It is next on the devices to support, but will require all of my time and effort to make that happen.

🍎 Apple Devices

No movement on this. I am looking at trying to acquire a Mac device cheaply to start testing this.