[kohanz]

You're thinking about this from the perspective of a developer, rather than the population at large. Suggest building a spreadsheet to one of your non-technical friends or family for something like this and you'll get a blank stare.

[mlthoughts2018]

My non-technical grandparents use Excel for tracking expenses. Yeah, they couldn’t do complex formulas or macros, but that’s irrelevant.

Using basic spreadsheet software is at least as ubiquitous as owning a home PC in the US. You can assume pretty much everyone can work their way through it, maybe with some help.

Meanwhile, you could easily argue that filling in the same data in a web form via a browser would be less intuitive for many people.

And regardless of which is easier, keeping the data private is clearly a priority.

[kohanz]

Yet despite all of those arguments, there are many budgeting or expense tracking "apps" (of the non-spreadsheet variety) out there that are popular, some of them massively.

Analogy: with a little time and some equipment, practically anyone could learn to DIY their own oil changes, yet very few do.

[mlthoughts2018]

I doubt the existence of apps has much relationship to whether people are capable with a spreadsheet, and it also doesn’t control for whether a person who finds spreadsheets difficult would also find an app or a web form difficult. If someone is just trying to avoid tech generally, apps vs web forms vs spreadsheets aren’t going to matter, and to anyone else, decades of ubiquity of using spreadsheet software for badic things would favor spreadsheets. Heck, even a lot of high schools teach basic personal finance using Excel and have been since the 90s (my extremely poor rural public high school was doing this in 1995 for example).

Also the top expense tracking app by number of users appears to be Mint (which claims somewhere near only 20MM users), which involves a great deal of data sharing and privacy questions. If we require a solution that keeps expense data private, it would shift a lot of favor to spreadsheets.

[IncRnd]

Your analogy only holds true if it is difficult to use a spreadsheet for adding and subtracting numbers. That's clearly false. Spreadsheets were the very first "killer apps" of computers for the precise reason that they are easy to use.

So many people use spreadsheets today. What are the non-spreadsheet budgeting or expense tracking apps that are highly used?

[IncRnd]

Spreadsheets used for calculating expenses were around long before computers.