Mint, the Web-based personal finance business Intel
acquired in 2009, on May 3 released a free application for devices running Google's Android
operating system.
Available now in the Android Market, Mint for Android helps smartphone users check their bank accounts, manage
their money and monitor their credit from the road.
The app is one of the roughly 50,000 Android apps
in the Android Market, which is striving to gain traction against Apple's
iPhone App Store, which boasts almost 200,000 apps.
Mint already offers an iPhone app, so adding Android is
par for the course for a company that wants to extend its financial service purview
to consumers across multiple platforms.
Mint for Android lets users see real-time account
balances, check recent transactions, compare spending against their monthly
budgets and change transaction details.
Users can also tap the Mint.com widget to see a
quick, live view of their account. Android's Live folders help provide Mint
users with financial updates on the phone's home screen without launching the
Mint.com application.
The app is password-protected, so if a user loses his
Android phone or reports it stolen, he can disable access from Mint.com.
In a breath of fresh air from some Android apps that only
work with the latest versions of Android, Mint for Android is available for
Android versions 1.5, 1.6, 2.0 and 2.1. This means users of almost any current
Android device will be able to use the app to manage their money.
For example, Twitter for Android is designed for Android 2.1 or greater, while Mozilla's early Fennec for Android will only support 2.0 or higher.
To access the Mint for Android app, any of the 3
million-plus Mint users can use their existing accounts to access the new
Android operating system features. Users new to Mint may set up a free account here and read reviews of the Mint for Android app here.
Mint.com has a nice success story. In less than three years, Mint.com
has grown to cover nearly $200 billion in transactions and $50 billion in assets
by helping consumers view all their financial accounts in one place.
Intuit, itself a major provider of business and financial
management software such as QuickBooks, Quicken and TurboTax, acquired Mint for $170 million last September.
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