Monday, December 5, 2016

Android App Review - Fuelio

+Fuelio  is a great utility app available on Android for logging your car fuel consumption and other costs such as insurance, repairs and maintenance. The app was so popular and well loved it was acquired in March 2015 by navigation app company Sygic. Pleasantly the Sygic has allowed the original developer Adrian Kajda to continue with development and product management rather than taking it all in house. As well as tracking your fuel top ups and consumption together with various car-related expenses, Fuelio also has many useful reports for gaining insights into your spending habits over various time periods and graphs to visualise the data.

Fuel Tracking and Reporting

Entering fuel is easy with the app showing your most recent odometer reading and calculating whichever of the fuel cost, total cost or amount of fuel you don't enter. Conveniently, you can still go back and edit any of the values - it will only auto-calculate the missing data once, which is what you'd want.



If you want, you can use the trip meter instead of the odometer reading, save the GPS location of the fill up (and report on it), and add a note.

The "(not set)" option in the Fuel type refers to the octane of the the petrol or the appropriate subtype of fuel based on the type for the car (diesel, ethanol, electric etc.)


So far though, I haven't found a way to include the fuel type in any reports, but it might be added in a future release.


With a full-tank fill up Fuelio will calculate the mileage between that fill up and the previous one, displaying it in green if it's more economical than the previous mileage calculation.

Cost Logging and Reporting

Fuelio has many built in cost categories such as insurance, tolls, maintenance, registration and you can add your own or delete those you're not using. In my case, I've created a CLUB cost category for the auto club memberships and of course I used the built in categories of SERVICE, REGISTRATION etc.  I like the segment graph of the various costs - it's handy to see an easy breakdown of costs of owning a vehicle.

  

The statistics are useful, providing averages, year-to-date, fill up and fuel statistics and km travelled.

  

Graphs

You can visualise the costs of your fill-ups and costs in a line chart over selected periods. The line graph of fuel and fill up costs helps you see price trends, and I like the bar chart of monthly costs to find expensive months.



If these aren't enough, there's a dedicated Create Report function which you can choose a custom time period and get aggregated statistics for Costs or Fuel or both for that time period.

Other Features

Calculator

A nice feature is a fuel economy calculator accessible from the home screen - enter the distance you plan to travel and the most recent millage (which the app of course can automatically surface for you) and Fuelio can calculate the cost for that distance. Apologies for the red tinge, I forgot I had Twilight running when I took the screenshots at night.


Syncing and Backup

Fuelio can backup it's data to Dropbox or Google Drive which I have used to sync to the tablet or of course you can restore to a new phone anyway. There is a new feature to sync between devices, presumably automatically (I haven't used it), but in the past I've just downloaded from Google Drive on the tablet as a spare copy for reference or something. Of course, I used the phone as the main device rather than the tablet.


Reminders

If you have recurring costs like tire checks every X KM or services every year, Fuelio can also remind you about them as appropriate when you fill up.


Multiple Vehicles

I only have one car, but for those that have multiple you can track all of the above features separately for each car, and record notes like make, model, year and registration.

Final Thoughts

I've been a long time Fuelio user and have appreciated the regular updates from the developer and the thought they've put in to the features and functionality. The app uses the Material Design language so it fits in well to the Android ecosystem, and looks good too. There are also app shortcuts which the new Pixel Launcher and Action Launcher 3 have exposed or you can manually set shortcuts to go straight to the fill up or add cost screens - handy at the service station or repair shop. Fuelio is available on the Play Store and Fuelio has a friendly website with an FAQ.

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