# Android & iPad apps for watching stocks



## Maj34 (Oct 7, 2011)

I've been trying to design the ultimate set up for watching my stocks and mutual funds between my home PC, my work PC, my Android phone, and my iPad 2. 

I'm going to report what I've figured out so far and then ask you if you've found anything that works for you.

The challenges: 
- Many of these devices don't play well together
- Many of the apps on the mobile devices don't handle Canadian stocks mutual/index funds very well.

My current system:
- I use google finance to create a list of stocks that I'm interested in watching. This handles 90% of the work for me. I can log into finance.google.ca on any PC/Mac desktop and view the stocks on my radar.
- On my Android phone I can install the app "Stocks" by Dato which logs into my google account and gives me my watch list on my phone

Why this is good: 
- I can add stocks on any PC and they just show up on my phone's watch list.
- I can add stocks on my phone and they show up in google finance.

Why it doesn't work: 
- I have a long watch list of 30-40 stocks that I like to keep an eye on. They are roughly sorted. The first 4-5 are the TSX Composite and other world indicies. Then I list a bunch of Canadian banks. Then I list a bunch of energy companys. Etc. Sometimes when I add a new stock it goes to the beginning of the list and messes everything up. Ok - I know this sounds trivial, but this app is just NOT THERE. It needs big improvement in several areas. 
- I can't seem to find an iPad app to sync with google finance (surprise).

--- 

Ok. The iPad was a Christmas gift from my company. I never would have bought an Apple product because of personal preference. (Hey - I recommend my non-techie friends and family buy apple products. This way I don't have to fix them; Apple saves me a lot of headache.)

All the apps I've found thus far for the iPad do not sync your watch-lists/portfolios with a web site. 

I found Yahoo MarketDash which syncs Yahoo Finance with the iPad but I can't find an app that will sync a watchlist from Yahoo Finance to an Android phone; I came close with the android app "Stock Watcher" which advertises that it "syncs with Yahoo finance's servers". But all they mean by this is that it uses data from yahoo finance. If you want to get the same watchlist you have to type in every symbol.

Goal: 
- Only have to maintain a watch-list in one place and have it synced to other devices. 
- To not have to remember how yahoo names TSE stocks (I.e., BNS.TO) vs how google finance names them (I.e., TSE:BNS).

I've tried Bloomberg apps which are highly rated on iPad and Android but they do not sync portfolios.

Anyone else out there with one foot in Android and another in iOS? Have you figured this out? Or am I the only person who wants this?? 

So far the simplest solution is to just bookmark and visit finance.google.ca on the iPad and keep my set up as is. It's just too bad that the supposed device of all devices doesn't have a good stock program that syncs wirelessly...


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## m3s (Apr 3, 2010)

Maj34 said:


> Why it doesn't work:
> - I have a long watch list of 30-40 stocks that I like to keep an eye on. They are roughly sorted. The first 4-5 are the TSX Composite and other world indicies. Then I list a bunch of Canadian banks. Then I list a bunch of energy companys. Etc. Sometimes when I add a new stock it goes to the beginning of the list and messes everything up. Ok - I know this sounds trivial, but this app is just NOT THERE. It needs big improvement in several areas.
> - I can't seem to find an iPad app to sync with google finance (surprise).


You can start new portfolios in Google finance, although I agree being able to arrange them like the native stock app would be nice. I have like 20 Google portfolios



Maj34 said:


> Goal:
> - Only have to maintain a watch-list in one place and have it synced to other devices.
> - To not have to remember how yahoo names TSE stocks (I.e., BNS.TO) vs how google finance names them (I.e., TSE:BNS).
> 
> ...


I came to the same conclusion - bookmarking Goog finance on the home screen. Any stock apps I've found leave a lot to be desired. If only I had time to program iOS (C++ java etc background)

Somewhat unrelated, apple seems to have taken out support for Goog calenders in the native calender? If Google ever takes away all their services from Apple, I'd have to switch to Android


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## Maj34 (Oct 7, 2011)

mode3sour said:


> You can start new portfolios in Google finance, although I agree being able to arrange them like the native stock app would be nice. I have like 20 Google portfolios


I've done this before but it presents another issue for someone as particular as I am; if I create multiple portfolios I have to use multiple widgets (one for each portfolio) on my background to display the stocks I want to watch. 



mode3sour said:


> I came to the same conclusion - bookmarking Goog finance on the home screen. Any stock apps I've found leave a lot to be desired. If only I had time to program iOS (C++ java etc background)


I have the background in C++ and programming in general but I have been out of programming now for a few years; the amount of effort required to develop and support a stellar app would be just too much by myself.



mode3sour said:


> Somewhat unrelated, apple seems to have taken out support for Goog calenders in the native calender? If Google ever takes away all their services from Apple, I'd have to switch to Android


I still have my google calendar syncing with the native calendar on my iPad. Although I haven't verified it's still working - it was working as of a couple of weeks ago.

In order to get it working you have to go to "Settings - Mail" and add an exchange account; use your gmail address for the username and password for the password. 

This was very easy to do and you end up with your google contacts, google calendar, and gmail all on your iPad.

This iPad was a Christmas gift and I'm trying to get some use out of it. So far it's collecting dust because I just can't get it to do the things my android phone does.


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## somecanuck (Dec 23, 2011)

Have you tried the native Google Finances app for Android? https://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.apps.finance&hl=en

It wouldn't solve your sorting issue without creating portfolios, but I'd think you could just point the iPad to the web site version.


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## Maj34 (Oct 7, 2011)

somecanuck said:


> Have you tried the native Google Finances app for Android? https://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.apps.finance&hl=en
> 
> It wouldn't solve your sorting issue without creating portfolios, but I'd think you could just point the iPad to the web site version.


Finance for android doesn't work for Canadian stock markets. And Google finance website doesn't work well on iPad due to the lack of flash. 

I found a solution that might work though; there's an iPad app called GFolio that syncs with google finance. It's $2.99 though and I'm a bit of a cheapskate.  Especially when there's no try-before-you-buy. Android has me spoiled; you can almost always find a good free app for everything.


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## DIYGUY (Jan 5, 2012)

*Yahoo*

I use Google Finance too. It would be nice if the native android app work for the TSX. Have you (or anyone) tried the android Yahoo Finance app by any chance? I don't see it in the Market but it looks like you can get it through their website.


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## vitalyx (May 4, 2012)

@Maj34 I think the reason you can't find any iPhone apps with Google Finance sync is because Google deprecated their finance API last year and will be shutting it down in October this year. This is, of course, very unfortunate, but as Google said on their blog, they are closing this API because they are forced to by the data vendors. So even apps that do allow Google Finance syncing now will probably stop working in October.

I wrote a similar app myself for webOS phones back in 2009. That platform died, though. So I recently ported the app to the Blackberry Playbook and Android ICS tablets. It works perfectly fine with Canadian stocks. If you guys want to check it out, please see this thread on Crackberry or the app's page on Google Play. I decided not to add the sync feature now only to remove it in October. That would be a major disappointment for many users.


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## TomB19 (Sep 24, 2015)

I can't find "Stocks" by Dato. Did Dato change his name to "uInvest Studio"?


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## TomB19 (Sep 24, 2015)

This app (Stocks by uInvest Studio) is identical to the Blackberry app. I love it.


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## MrMatt (Dec 21, 2011)

I use the Google Finance web page, or my Google Docs spreadsheet that just pulls the data in for me.


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