Discover

Discover is a single-page tour of the most-loved community work in Essential Budget. It pulls the top community themes, icon sets, and individual icons by like count over four rolling windows (today, this week, this month, this year) and lays them out in three labeled groups so you can scan all of it in one place.

This page covers where Discover lives, how its sections are ranked, what tapping a card does, and what is intentionally not on Discover. The mechanics for installing, liking, bookmarking, and downloading themes and icon sets live on Themes and Icons; Discover hands off to that page once you find something you want.

Where to find it

Open the hamburger menu in the top corner of any page and tap Discover. The entry sits between Icons and Search, with a compass icon. The page also has a direct URL at /discover if you prefer to bookmark it.

You have to be signed in to open Discover. There is no Premium gate; browsing community content is free across the app.

The Community Content prompt

The first time you reach Discover, or any other page in the app that shows community work, you see a one-page prompt headed Community Content. It explains that themes, icon sets, and public budgets in the app are made by other users, that the app uses automated AI moderation to filter inappropriate material, and that the team does not manually review every contribution. A single button labelled I Understand records your acknowledgement and removes the prompt.

The acknowledgement is per account, not per page: tap I Understand once on Discover, the Themes Community tab, the Icons Community tab, a public profile, or a public budget link, and the prompt stops appearing on all of them. There is no way to undo the acknowledgement.

If you find a theme or icon set that breaks community guidelines, the report flow is on the item’s own detail surface, not on Discover. Open the theme or icon set on its Community tab or detail page and use the report option there.

What you’ll see

Discover is organized into three groups, in this order:

• Top Icons. Individual icons that the community has liked the most. Each icon belongs to a published icon set; the card shows the icon, its name, the icon set it lives in, and the creator’s username.
• Top Icon Sets. Whole published icon sets, ranked by likes on the set itself. The card shows the set’s name, an optional description, the icon count, the creator’s username, and a row of the first 5 icons in the set so you can get a feel for its style without opening it.
• Top Themes. Published themes, ranked by likes on the theme. The card shows the theme’s name, an optional description, the creator’s username, and a row of thin color rectangles spanning the full palette (8 to 12 colors) so you can see the look at a glance.

Each group has a four-button row at the top labeled Today, This Week, This Month, This Year. Tap a button to switch the cards under it to that time window. This Week is selected by default; the other periods load when you switch to them.

Each group shows up to ten cards for the active period in a horizontally-scrolling row. Swipe left to see more.

Icons appear as their own group because individual icons inside a set can be liked separately. A theme inside a popular icon set might end up in Top Icons even if the set as a whole is not in Top Icon Sets, and vice versa.

Why this default? Discover ranks by likes, not by recency or downloads. A community page that ranks by recency floats the newest things to the top whether or not anyone wanted them; ranking by downloads turns into a popularity-of-popularity loop. Ranking by likes is closer to a vote: people install all sorts of things and only like the ones they actually enjoyed using. The trade-off is that brand-new community work needs at least one like before it appears on Discover at all. The Themes Community tab and the Icons Community tab on the Themes and Icons page have Most Recent and Most Downloaded sort options if those are what you want.

How items are ranked

Within each sub-section, the order is by the count of likes the item received during that period, with ties broken first by lifetime like count and then by which item was published more recently. Each section caps at ten items. Items the community has never liked at all do not appear, even if they are brand new.

The four windows are rolling, not calendar-aligned. Today covers the last 24 hours from now, This Week covers the last 7 days, This Month covers the last 30 days, and This Year covers the last 365 days. A theme that picked up a like ten minutes ago is in Today; a theme last liked six months ago is in This Year but not in This Month.

Because the windows overlap, the same theme often appears in two or three sections. A theme that has been getting steady likes all year shows up in Today, This Week, This Month, and This Year. A theme that had a one-day burst of likes a month ago shows up in This Year but no longer in This Month.

Liking and unliking happen on the Community tab of Themes and Icons and on the icon set detail page. Discover itself has no Like button on its cards. If you unlike a theme you previously liked, your like is subtracted from each window it falls inside, and the theme can drop out of Discover on the next visit.

A creator can also revoke a published theme or icon set. Revoked work stops accepting new likes and falls out of the rankings the next time Discover refreshes. See Themes and Icons for what revoking does to people who already installed the work.

Tapping a card

Tapping a card opens its destination:

• An icon card is display-only. The card shows the popular icon, its name, the set it belongs to, and the creator. Tapping it does nothing on its own; to interact with the icon, find its parent set in the Top Icon Sets row and tap that.
• An icon set card opens the icon set’s detail page. Once you are on the set, you can preview every icon, like the set, like individual icons, bookmark the set, and download a copy.
• A theme card opens the Community tab on the Themes and Icons page, lands on the tapped theme with it pre-selected and previewing on the open budget, and opens the View Theme dialog so you can see the full color list. There is no per-theme detail page; the Community tab is where every theme operation lives (install on a budget, like, bookmark, download).

Why this default? Tapping a theme on Discover opens its View Theme dialog. Themes do not have their own detail page in the app today, so opening the dialog gives you the same in-depth look you would get by double-tapping the row on the Themes Community tab. The theme is also previewed on your open budget at full size, so you can see how the colors actually feel before installing.

Saving for later, liking, downloading

These are the things you do with a community item once you find it. Discover is the wayfinding surface; the actions live on the destination page:

• Like. Tap Like on the Community tab toolbar of Themes and Icons, or on the icon set detail page. Likes count toward the rankings on Discover.
• Bookmark. Tap Add Bookmark on the same toolbars. Bookmarks are personal; they do not affect Discover rankings. Bookmarked items show up under a Bookmarked filter on the Community tabs.
• Install or download. The picker on the Edit Budget dialog lets you apply a community theme or icon set to a budget. The Community tab toolbar’s Download Theme or Download Icon Set lets you save a copy to your device.

All three are documented in detail on Themes and Icons. Discover does not duplicate those flows.

Following a creator

Each card shows the creator’s username with an @ prefix when the creator has one. Tap the username to open that creator’s public profile. The profile lists everything the creator has published in three tabs: their public budgets, their themes, and their icon sets. See Your Public Profile for what a profile page looks like and how the Show toggles affect what the visitor sees.

If the by-line is missing on a card (no @ line under the creator slot), the creator’s account has been deleted. Their published themes and icon sets stay in the community library; the link back to the original creator just no longer exists.

When Discover is empty

If no public theme, icon set, or icon in the entire app has any likes, Discover renders a single message: Featured Content, with the body No featured content yet. Be the first to create and share!. The empty state is global; once one item anywhere in the community has been liked, the relevant group appears.

A more common case is that the period you’re looking at is empty for that group. Today can be empty for icons if nothing in that group has been liked in the last 24 hours, even though This Year has many entries. The page tells you so plainly under the period buttons (No featured icons today, for example); switch to a wider window if you want to see more.

What Discover does not have

A few surfaces deliberately do not exist here:

• No public budgets. Public budgets are not browsable as a list anywhere in the app. The two ways someone reaches a public budget are by following the share link the publisher sent them or by visiting the publisher’s public profile. See Publishing a Budget.
• No filter, search, or sort controls on the page. The page itself is a flat layout of fixed sections. The Themes Community tab and the Icons Community tab on Themes and Icons have search, filter, and sort affordances if you want to explore by name, by style, or by a different ranking.
• No notifications when new community work is published. Discover does not push you toward it. You go to it. See Notifications for the full list of things the bell does notify you about.
• No AI charge. Browsing community work is not an AI feature; opening Discover does not draw on Premium Subscriber Credits or Icon Generation Credits. See Subscription.

Behind the scenes

A few details that the screen does not surface directly:

• Periods load on demand. Opening Discover fetches only the This Week content for each of the three groups, so the page paints quickly. Tapping Today, This Month, or This Year for the first time fetches that period for that group; the result is held in memory for the rest of your visit, so flipping back and forth is instant.
• Each group loads independently. A slow request for one group does not hold up the others. The group you’re waiting on shows a small spinner under its period buttons; the others render as soon as their own data arrives.
• No offline support. Every period needs a live request. With no connection, the active period stays on the loading state until the connection returns; nothing is cached across visits for offline browsing.
• Signed-out users cannot reach Discover. The route is gated to signed-in accounts. The community lists themselves require auth on the server, so even an attempt at the URL while signed out routes you through sign-in first.
• Items the community has never liked never appear. The “no likes, no listing” rule keeps the page meaningful as a featured surface rather than a complete inventory. To browse everything published, use the Community tab on Themes and Icons.

Related pages

• Themes and Icons: the Community tab on Themes and Icons, where Like, Bookmark, install, and download live for each content type. Tapping a card on Discover hands off to this page.
• Publishing a Budget: public budgets are reached by share link or by a creator’s public profile, not from Discover. Also where the public profile page is described.
• Subscription: browsing community content is free; publishing your own work is the part that requires Premium.
• Notifications: for context that Discover does not push notifications when new community work appears; the bell only handles invites, access changes, and app updates.