Don't you have it too quite often that you are at a restaurant with family or friends and you realise you didn't bring any cash? So you decide to pay for everybody and they have to pay you. Or that you bought all the movie tickets and your friends have to pay you afterwards for their ticket.
Usually that means following up with everybody, people forgetting, sending reminders etc.
But not anymore! The Going Dutch app is going to solve that for you. And it does not even require always an internet connection, only during the actual payment, which can be postponed to a more convenient time!
The Going Dutch app is allowing group payment from you and/or by your friends/family via PayPal using a wireless Bluetooth connection. That means it is a contactless form of consumer to consumer (c2c or p2p) payment. And unlike NFC you don't need to keep your phones a maximum of about 10cm apart, you can be meters apart from each other!
As the one that needs to get paid (the Payee) you start the Going Dutch app and tap the Get Paid icon.
That allows the Payee to enter the nr of persons that have to pay, the amount the have to pay, etc. Pressing Get Paid then makes it wait for Payers to connect. In short, the payment is "pushed" to the payers.
Your friends (the Payers) also have started the Going Dutch app. They press the Pay button after which it goes searching for a Payee device. As soon as it shows the right one, the Payer taps that entry. The Payer's app then receives the amount information from the Payee device, shows it, allows the Payer to overwrite it (for example his main course was more expensive), and the Payer can pay via the regular PayPal interface.
But maybe the Payer is having too much fun, so she doesn't want to pay right now. No problem, just select Pay Later and a reminder-notification will be shown on top of her phone. Whenever the Payer starts the app at a later point, for example the next day at home, a red counter badge shows there are still payments outstanding and the Payer can pay at that much more convenient moment!
The Going Dutch app uses BlueTooth as inter-device communication.
It has been tested on the following configurations:
- Android 2.2.1, 2.3.3, 2.1upd1
- BlueTooth: 2.1, 3.0
- Nexus One, Samsung Galaxy S2 and Ace, HTC Wildfire, HTC Desire HD
The app supports a maximum of 20 payers and has currently been tested with 1 and 2 payers.
Going Dutch users must have a PayPal account for both being a Payee and a Payer. No need for any other type of sign-up/new payment forms.
Note that when two devices connect for the very first time, they have to be "paired" via BlueTooth. On some devices that request for pairing appears in the status bar at the top of the device, and might be missed. Check if there's a notification pending when connecting two devices does not work. Some phones handle Bluetooth better than others, just retry connecting when it fails.
Also note that after the payment, the Payee receives an email to confirm the payment(s).
Permissions explained:
Network communication: for Bluetooth communication
Phone calls: for PayPal SDK
System tools: for Bluetooth communication
Don't forget to report any problems to goingdutch [at] dedicado [dot] nl, because reviews can't be replied to.
Version history:
20110629: 1.0.1 - added QVGA screen support
20110626: 1.0.0 - first release
