Creating a Stock Portfolio Management Tool
Given a reasonable amount of knowledge about the stock market and having done my first few trades, the time was right to look at tooling to manage my investments.
The main thing I wanted to know being: how are my stocks doing? Am I turning a profit?
Naturally I turned to the app store to solve my woes and made a few observations:
- Stock monitoring apps are abundant.
- Most apps offer tons of functionality by surfacing most features of their underlining stock exchange.
- as a direct result their user experience is oftentimes questionable.
- Monitoring your specific orders is rarely an option.
- Native / modern looking trading apps are rare.
Starting from scratch I had a few goals in mind.
Be as close to the system as possible
The system being iOS, I aimed to implement Apples native SDKs before looking at 3rd party solutions. This lead me to take a closer look at CloudKit, Combine, DarkMode and SF Symbols.
Be as simple as possible
Starting by only offering the answer to one particular question: How is my portfolio doing today?
Aim to break even
Stock Market APIs aren’t free. Ignoring the initial development cost (i’d write those of as a learning experience), a reasonably successful app would end up creating a maintenance bill.
All options considered I ended up implementing ads into the app.
Stockable is now available on the AppStore (for english speaking countries). Take a look and drop a review If you enjoy using the app.
David