Zero Became the #1 App in the Philippines in Less Than a Day

What if Apple made a finance tracking app?

That was the question behind Zero.

Meet Zero — a finance tracker built from the ground up in native Swift, designed to feel at home across the entire Apple ecosystem.

Available on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac, with real-time iCloud sync across your devices. It even launched with iPhone Duo support on day one.

No clutter. No complicated setup. Just a fast, minimal way to track your money, manage accounts and cards, plan ahead, and understand where everything goes.

And somehow, less than a day after launching:

#1 App — All Categories

#1 App — Finance Category

#1 Top-Selling Finance App

#1 Finance App in 17 Countries

Including the Philippines, Singapore, Qatar, UAE, and more.

I expected Zero to find its audience eventually. I didn't expect all of this to happen in its first 24 hours.

Why I Built Zero

I already build another finance app, Tarsi, so naturally one of the first questions was:

Why build another finance tracker?

Because Zero isn't meant to replace Tarsi.

Tarsi is designed to make personal finance more friendly and engaging. It has personality, customization, streaks, achievements, and a companion that encourages you to build better financial habits.

Zero explores the opposite direction.

I wanted to see how far I could take simplicity, speed, and native Apple experiences.

Zero is deliberately quiet. It gets out of your way.

Open it, log what happened, and move on.

You can type something as simple as:

Coffee 180 GCash

and Zero understands what happened and records it.

Behind that minimal interface is a complete finance tracker for managing your accounts, cards, transactions, budgets, bills, goals, debts, forecasts, and more.

Built Natively for Apple

One of my biggest goals with Zero was to make it feel like it genuinely belongs on Apple devices.

Not a web app inside a wrapper.

Not one interface stretched across different screen sizes.

Zero is built from the ground up in native Swift.

That means I can take advantage of each platform instead of treating them as an afterthought.

iPhone for everyday tracking.

iPad when you want more space to see your finances.

Apple Watch for quick access from your wrist.

Mac for managing everything from your desktop.

And iCloud keeps everything synchronized in real time.

The idea is simple: wherever you are in the Apple ecosystem, your money should be there too.

From Launch to #1

The biggest surprise wasn't Zero reaching #1 in Finance.

It was opening the charts and seeing Zero become the:

#1 app in the entire Philippine App Store.

Not just Finance.

All categories.

At the same time, Zero started climbing Finance charts internationally, eventually reaching #1 Finance in 17 countries.

All within roughly a day of launch.

For something I built as an independent developer, that's difficult to process.

An App Built in the Philippines, Reaching the World

This is also one of the things I love about building software today.

A developer in the Philippines can build something, publish it to the App Store, and almost immediately have people using it around the world.

You don't necessarily need a massive engineering organization.

You need an idea worth testing, the ability to execute it, and people willing to give what you built a chance.

Zero is still extremely young.

There are things I want to improve, bugs I'll inevitably find, and a long list of ideas I want to explore.

But becoming #1 overall in the Philippines and reaching #1 Finance across 17 countries in its first day is a beginning I won't forget.

Thank you to everyone who downloaded Zero, shared it, sent feedback, reported an issue, or simply gave a new app a chance.

This is only day one.

Built natively for Apple. Built in the Philippines.

Let's see where Zero goes next.