[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.