I’m an accountant. I built an Android app with AI. Here’s what actually took the time.
<p>I keep the books at a fiberglass factory in Bahrain. I am not a developer. This year I shipped a finance app to Google Play anyway — built almost entirely by an AI assistant I talk to like a colleague.</p>
I keep the books at a fiberglass factory in Bahrain. Twenty-plus years of ledgers, invoices, statements of account and month-end closings. I am not a developer — I have never written a line of code professionally, and I have no intention of starting now.
This year I shipped a finance app to Google Play anyway. Built almost entirely by an AI assistant I talk to like a colleague. If you have been wondering whether AI can build you something real — not a demo, not a toy — this is what the honest version of that journey looks like.
Why I built it
For years I tracked my own money the way most accountants secretly do: a spreadsheet I half-trusted, a notebook, and a memory that was definitely worse than both.
I wanted a simple personal finance app — income, expenses, accounts, bills, reports — that spoke my languages (English, Bengali, Arabic), worked on my phone, and kept my data on a server I controlled. I searched the Play Store. Everything was either too complicated, too expensive, or too chatty about my data.
So I asked my AI assistant a very long, very specific question: can you build me this?
How the building actually worked
No code camps. No “learn Python in 30 days”. Here is the whole method:
- I described, it built. I explained what I wanted in plain language — screens, buttons, behaviour, even the colours. The assistant wrote the backend (a PHP API running on my own VPS), the MySQL database, and then the Android app itself in Kotlin.
- I tested, it fixed. Every evening I installed the app on my phone, found something wrong, and reported it like a bug report from a very angry customer. It apologised, fixed it, and handed me a new version.
- It explained everything in plain words. I never saw a command I couldn’t copy-paste. When I asked “why”, it gave me a one-paragraph answer, not a lecture.
- I made the decisions. It suggested; I approved. Every choice about money, privacy and design went through me.
The app is called Arshara Finance. Dashboard, accounts, transactions, reports, budgets, bill reminders, multi-currency, backup and restore. It took weeks of evenings — not months of full-time work.
What actually took the time
Here is the part nobody on X posts about. The code was the easy 20%. The other 80% was paperwork, and AI cannot do it for you:
- The Play developer account. $25, plus an identity verification where your name has to match your ID exactly. Took days.
- The keystore. The single most important file you will ever own as an app developer. Lose it and you can never update your app again. I have it backed up in two places and I still check on it like a sick relative.
- Google Sign-In. One wrong client type in the Google Cloud Console and the app throws a “Developer Error” — to non-developers like me, that message is the most terrifying sentence in the English language.
- The target API level. Google quietly requires your app to target the latest Android version within a year. Ours had to jump to Android 16 by August 31 — a deadline that felt exactly like a VAT filing, right down to the panic on the last day.
- Store listing, privacy policy, data safety form, screenshots. The unglamorous 400 words that decide whether anyone trusts you.
The honest part
AI made plenty of mistakes. It used the wrong OAuth setup once and broke login for everyone. A forgotten-password email silently failed for days because of a typo in a shell script — a typo! — that a human reviewer would have caught in seconds. Every fix was a conversation, not a rewrite.
The lesson I keep coming back to: AI removed the coding barrier, not the thinking. You still have to know what you want, test what you get, and sit through the paperwork. The tools are cheap now. The discipline is not.
If a factory accountant in Bahrain can ship an app this way, the barrier is lower than you think. Your idea is probably not the problem. Your patience is.
Arshara Finance is available on Google Play. More about the app: arsharafin.com
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