Billy

Table of contents

• Brief introduction
• Tech Notes
  • Building blocks of this project
  • Misc Tech Notes
• Set up instructions
  • Install dependencies
  • Clearing cache
• Motivations for building the app

Brief introduction

This project is developed solely by Estee Tey. If you are keen on how the app idea came about, you can refer to the motivations section.

• Live progress on this project can be found in this #BuildInPublic tweet thread.
• For more in-depth details on planned & implemented features, you could refer to ROADMAP.md.

Tech Notes

Building blocks of this project

• UI Kittens for UI components
• Supabase for Database & Auth. Data is served by REST.
• React Native MMKV for caching
• Notifee for creating notifications
• Custom GitHub action for generating Supabase database types

Misc Tech Notes

If you are interested on some other tech notes how this app is built (e.g. how the app is bootstrapped, mockup etc), check out the tech notes.

Set up instructions

Install dependencies

Install the node modules & pods

npm i
npx pod-install # if you want to build for ios

Then run 1 of the commands

npm run ios
npm run android

You would need the Supabase project related environment variables as mentioned in .env.sample. You can create your own Supabase project and replace those values.

Clearing cache

There is a utility function on SyncService for logging the user out, clearing all cache and notifications. Intended mostly for testing purposes.

const init = async () => {
  // add this line for clearing cache temporarily
  await SyncService.clearAllData();

  await SyncService.syncAllData();
  await registerDeviceForRemoteMessages();
};

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Motivations for building the app

I had built Billy intended for these few specific target audiences:

• Less tech-savvy users like my mom, who are only-mobile users, and prefer having specific apps for specific functionalities. They would benefit heavily from native notifications to keep track of their bills.
• Techies like me who are less organized, but has a ton of subscriptions to remember to manage and pay on time. Many times, I also don't want to automatically renew these subscriptions if I don't use them much during the trial period.

My mom & I both like cute stuff, so that's how Billy has its name.