How to Build an Investment App – A Comprehensive Guide

Building mobile apps is not a complicated matter today. There are many who could build you amazing mobile investing apps.

What demands diligent efforts is when you seek the development of a mobile app with a highly specific category such as communication, investment, socializing and more.

Out of all, investment is a domain that is often neglected because of the high level of complexity and, inherently, the investment that is to be put at stake.

How to build an investment app is a question that needs a comprehensive answer.

This history of investment dates back to centuries. As we progressed and got more dependent on technology, our life has eased significantly.

In earlier days, anyone willing to invest or trade stocks had to visit the stock exchange to call the shot. Then came the time when you could invest by just calling your broker on the line.

Today, you can always call the representative to invest, trade, or pull out your investments. But there is an easier option available. Many mobile apps in the market let you play with your money, providing you with complete control of your actions.

Investing apps, just like money others, have become increasingly popular among the masses. The need for financial education has grown over time, and no one has emphasized it enough.

With easy access to investment apps, it has now become convenient for everyone to learn new techniques and earn while on the go – without having to deal with any conventional problems.

When we talk about building get online investors for apps, you should take a few critical factors into account.

• Targeted audience
• Audience size
• Presence of potential competitors
• Unique selling propositions (USP)

We will dig deeper into these factors later in this article and discover why they play a vital role in the success of mobile investing apps.

So, if you are looking to learn about building investment apps, this article is for you.

Is It Worth Building an Investment App?

Building online investment apps is not a gamble, especially when 80.63% population of the world has access to smartphones.

Learning about money, how it flows in and out, carrying out swift transactions worldwide has never been easier. With mere taps and clicks, you can buy, sell, trade, invest or ship anything anywhere in the world.

Earlier, it was only for the elderly and educated individuals, mostly men, that they could invest in the stocks while keeping an eye on the ups and downs.

Today, whether you are a housewife who spends most of the time unproductive or a teen with a want to build a fortune.

You can easily visit the mobile app store and search for the best investment apps to download and get started with your journey towards financial freedom.

What Are the Must-Have Features of an Investment App?

Finding top investment apps is not an issue. However, building a feature-rich and robust investing app is a task that demands a lot.

From understanding user perspectives to ensuring smooth functionalities. From friendly user experience to value-addition to the lives of end-users.

You should keep each aspect under consideration to ensure the app that is not flop, on point, and serves the very purpose it is being built for.

Chiefly, here are a few aspects that you must not overlook while building accessible investment apps.

• Ensure a secure and convenient platform
• Provide all the contemporary features
• Pay attention to making the user experience better
• Make it work fast

Which Type of Investment App Are You Looking to Build?

There are several types of mobile investment apps. The decision of whether you can build one or not rests on who you are.

So, before we discuss more specific features that your app should have, let’s learn about the types of investment apps. It will not only provide an idea of what they are but also bring clarity on which kind of investment apps is your favorite.

1. Investing Apps

Investing apps serve the fundamental purpose of connecting investors and brokers. You can find both on the platform. These investing apps primarily make it easier to get pieces of advice. So, whatever your needs are regarding investment, these apps will fulfill them.

Examples of investing apps: Invstr, Betterment, Acorns, Wealthbase

2. Trading Apps

Trading apps, also known as exchange-traded funds apps, enable you to invest in stocks with complete control. Users can review, discuss and participate in the trading of stocks. You can also carry out relevant operations when necessary.

Examples of trading apps: Robinhood, Stockpile, Webull, Vanguard

3. Banking Apps

These are the apps that are usually powered by banks and regulatory authorities. These apps typically have all the features for the end-users to carry out all the banking and pertinent operations through the app. These apps may have additional features as well.

Examples of banking apps: PNC, Capital One, Chase, Ally

The types of mobile investment apps we have discussed above are the basic ones. An app can have features of multiple apps. A hybrid version of these apps can be built as per the requirements.

Top 8 Investment Mobile Apps Case Studies

Before you begin building any application, one good practice is to analyze your competitors. This way, you will get an idea of what works for the targeted audience. Furthermore, you will develop an understanding of what you can do to make the solution even better.

We have compiled a list of the top 8 investment apps that you must consider before making one for yourself.

1. Acorns

If you are looking for an investing app that is genuinely unmistakable when it comes to handling all investment-related matters, Acorns is your answer. This app is one of the most renowned in the investing circles.

For all the essential services, you don’t get charged even a penny. You only have to pay when you have to use some specific services. The amazing features of Acorns provide you with an all-inclusive experience.

2. Wealthbase

If you are looking for a new entrant in the market, Wealthbase is the one app you are looking for. The app has a super-easy UI that makes users feel at home. This is one of the fascinating features of the app as well.

The gamified interface of the Wealthbase app lets users and investors sift through seamlessly from one screen to another while not getting bored. Various other features of the application make your overall experience perfect.

3. Invstr

Pronounce it the way you want – like investor or Invstr – both sound same. This Invstr app is claimed to be the best app if you are looking to learn how to invest. It has all the tutorials and features to guide you through your early days.

Invstr can sail you through quickly when you start and when you are pro, you will still get all the necessary options to become even better. With Invstr’s Fantasy Finance, you can learn how to manipulate money and manage it all through a single app with complete assistance.

4. Wealthfront

The Wealthfront is your front to manage and maintain all your financials. Whether you have an extensive financial portfolio or you are just getting started with a perfect grasp on all the technicalities, Wealthfront provides you the avenues to ace.

The Wealthfront investing app is so exquisitely built that you get all the detailed information regarding your tax history, saving account, retirement plans, and other relevant schemes. The app does charge you a significant amount if you cross a certain threshold or request a premium service.

5. Robinhood

If you are a no-nonsense kind of person who wants things simple and straightforward, you will like Robinhood. The Robinhood investing app has simplified trading through the internet by introducing groundbreaking features in their mobile application.

The leverage to manage EFTs, cryptocurrency, free stocks without any charges really throws the ball in Robinhood’s court. Although you don’t get an option to seek within-app expert advice, you can make use of other valuable features.

6. Betterment

If there is one investing app that aims to transform the world into a better place, it is Betterment. The app is engineered to provide excellent advice to the users as well as foster a healthy societal change through focusing on minor details.

The app has several revolutionary features that allow the users and investors to gain maximum advantage. Automation, identification of high-paying stocks, suggestions on the stock market, and many more features make Betterment ultimately the better option in many regards.

7. Stockpile

The incredible feature of Stockpile, letting you send stocks to your friends, family, and loved ones, indeed came out of the blue. Overall, this investing app has a unique approach towards investing using a mobile investment app. That is one of the factors that it attracts more and more people to use it.

One incredible feature of the Stockpile mobile investing app is that it allows the investors and buyers to buy fractional shares of the companies. This, if you don’t have the money to buy a pile of stocks, lets you buy the stocks with the bit of investment you have. This also serves as the kickstart for you need to get started.

8. Webull

Webull has been a known name in the league of mobile investing apps. This top-rated investment offered absolutely free trading opportunities to investors and users with utmost transparency in its early days. Today, a few features of the app require you to pay a meager sum.

Moreover, the app also supports free trades of cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum, Bitcoin, and more. Webull also allows you to have your own taxable account integrated. On top of that, IRA and other similar benefits set your financial hurdles straight.

Steps to Build a Great Mobile Investment App

Building an exquisite investment app is a delicate and time-consuming process. You need to ensure every step and every phase is dealt with precision. To make things perfect for the end-users, following this process will give you a chance to get ahead with it easily.

1. Jot Down Your Idea

2. Gather Information

3. Study Your Potential Competitors

4. Set Your Goals

5. Hire A Development Firm

6. Build & Finalize the Design

7. Choose Your Preferred Technologies

8. Begin with Investment App Development

9. Test Your Investing App

10. Launch Your App for The Audience

The steps mentioned above provide a holistic view of how you can build an amazing investing app. Let’s discuss these in detail and tell what each step is about.

1. Document Your Idea & All the Features

The first step is important if you don’t want to be diverted in the later stages. First, you should brainstorm and write down all the ideas and features you have in mind. From finalizing the color themes to choosing the number of screens to some unique features, list everything down.

This step is critical because, once documented, you will have the clarity to build what you know. You will learn how much time the project would need and how much scope creep you can tolerate during the development phase.

2. Gather Information

Once you are done with the brainstorming and documentation part, the next step is to do the information gathering. In order to gather concrete and valuable insights and ideas, you will have to go through various steps. From reading scholarly articles to visiting numerous forums to meeting individuals and conducting surveys, you will have to do it all.

Furthermore, to ensure the information you have gathered is valuable, you have to have some degree of expertise to analyze the information and store only the piece that is relevant and useful. Again, this step carries a lot of weight and what you will build in the upcoming stages depends a lot on this, which is why you must make sure that you sail through this step with great care and caution.

3. Study Your Potential Competitors

If you have plans to jump into the market, one mandatory step that you cannot skip is studying your competitors. You don’t always have to reinvent the wheel, the same way you don’t have to bring something totally new to the market.

This step remains constant for every industry and every project. Not only do you understand what works for your competitors, but you also understand where they might be missing out, and you can catch up on that. That is one of the reasons why you must never skip studying your competitors.

4. Set Your Goals

After completing all the earlier steps, now is the time to start with setting your goals and where you want to be. Whether you want to build a mobile investment app for a limited audience or go for masses or otherwise, determining your objectives is essential.

Moreover, after you know what you want to build and where you want to end up, the path gets clear and easy for you to follow. For example, if you are looking to go from Point A to B, you will only succeed if you know both points. Only then will you be able to decide the path to trot on.

5. Hire A Development Firm

Having a solid idea is great, but one needs to have a team of technical experts, designers, developers, project managers, and other people to build a complete investing app. When you decide to begin with the development process, you have two options.

First, you can build yourself a team of individuals with varying skill sets. Second, you can hand over your project to an experienced app development company to get your app built. The second option is often more suitable because you save yourself a considerable amount of time and effort that you can spend elsewhere, in a more productive manner.

6. Build & Finalize the Design

When you hire a team, all you will be doing is supervise or overlook their efforts. You can also provide occasional instructions when necessary. To kickstart the project of your online investment apps, you first have to start working on the design.

The design phase will incorporate the steps and features finalized in steps one, two, and three discussed above. The designers and managers will be reviewing and working in the phase. Mainly, they will work on the frontend design that includes UI (user interface) and UX (user experience). The design phase will be the stage where all of the investing app’s screens and other designs will be developed.

7. Choose Your Preferred Technologies

Once your design is ready, now comes the time to choose the technologies for your mobile investment app. Here, you get multiple options. Let’s walk through them one by one.

Native App Development

• If you are looking to build native mobile apps, which are for only one platform, whether iOS or Android, you get the following options.
• For native Android investment app development, two technologies or languages are used. These include Java and Kotlin. Java is an old language, while Kotlin is a new addition that is rapidly gaining popularity worldwide.
• For native iOS investment app development, again, two technologies or languages are used. These languages are Objective C and Swift. Same as the other platform, Objective C is an older language while Swift is a newer and somewhat more powerful technology.

Hybrid App Development

• If you are looking to build a hybrid app, which means an app for multiple platforms using a single codebase, hybrid mobile app development is for you. Here are your options for hybrid application development.
• Your first option for hybrid mobile application development is Flutter. This is a Google-backed technology, a UI Development toolkit that lets you design and build exquisite apps. It uses Dart language to build apps.
• The second option for hybrid mobile apps development is React Native. This is a JavaScript-based open-source framework that is actively supported and maintained by Facebook (now Meta). It is used to build robust and beautiful hybrid apps for multiple platforms.

There are some other hybrid app development technologies as well, such as Ionic, TypeScript, and others, but those have a lesser share in the development domain around the globe.

8. Begin with Your Investment App’s Development

Have you chosen the right technology stack for your app according to your requirements? Great.

Now you can start with your app’s development. From building the seamless frontend to the backend, the XML for the design, and the delicate little animations – all will make the app’s overall experience better.

Once your frontend, backend, designs, and APIs are done, then you integrate all the modules together to make them work in unison. Integration usually don’t come as easy as it sounds, but a few variable adjustments, routes correction, and speed issues can be resolved with no trouble in proceeding ahead smoothly.

9. Test Your Investing App Thoroughly

Built the complete app that you wanted to? Perfect.

No software is flawless unless it is QA-ed. To make it unfaulty, you will have to exhaustively test on multiple standards to make sure that nothing goes wrong when it is with the users. From load testing to functional and non-functional testing to white box and black box testing, you have to process through each step.

Also, don’t forget to test your app against modern cybersecurity threats because you don’t want your app’s data, or precisely your users’ data, to fall into the wrong hands. There are several independent security and penetration testers that you can hire, but ideally, the app development agency you hire must provide you with these services.

Moreover, to test all the app’s features and functions entirely, you can employ Usability Testing techniques to be sure about each part. A Beta launch of your app can also serve the purpose pretty well.

10. Launch Your App for The Audience

Last but not least – you get to launch your app for the world. You can choose either Apple App Store or Google Play Store or both for your Android and iOS applications.

To launch or publish your app, you need to follow a few rules during the development phase. There is nothing to worry about because professional app development teams generally cater to all such requirements.

Furthermore, if you think that once you launch your app, your work is done, you might want to reconsider this thought. Because once you have an active audience on your app, you always need to be on guard. You have to be ready because you never know when a problem arises.

That is why you must also get support and maintenance services for your application as well.

How Much Does It Cost to Build an Investment Mobile App?

When you talk about building an app, there are variables upon which the app development depends. Here are a few.

• The scale of the application/audience
• Time required to build/number of hours
• Level of expertise required
• Chosen technology stack
• Features and functions of the app
• Safety and security features
• Usage of external services

These are some of the factors that affect development costs. Some more specific features and services can make the costs soar high or low.

A typical business solution mobile application can cost somewhere around $40,000 to $70,000. A feature-intensive app can also cost you up to $100,000 and more.

However, when it comes to building an investment application, you must have a figure of around $100,000 to $150,000 or maybe more, depending on the requirements and the features you are looking to offer.

How Can You Earn as an Investment App Owner?

There are various ways of earning through a mobile investment app – apart from investing in the stocks yourself. The process, in technical terms, is called monetization.

1. Paid Subscriptions

This is one of the most useful and widely used methods worldwide. You can offer paid subscriptions or premium accounts to the users. This way, they can start buying stocks, investing in them, and trade them whenever they want.

2. Ads Placements

Another popular method to earn from your investing apps is to place ads at multiple places in your app. This can be a banner at the top or the bottom of the screen, or you can seamlessly place them between screen transitions.

3. Transaction Fees

One obvious way you can earn through an app is the fee you charge for every transaction. This can be a fixed amount, or it can vary depending upon the size of the transaction. You can also design your tariff based on multiple slabs.

Takeaway

We agree that this is a lot of content to read, consume and comprehend. Still, all that we have written above is important. To build a great mobile investment app, you must make sure that all the ingredients are there and put together in just the proper manner.

Building an app often gets too hectic, and that is when you must leave it to the professionals. While you must not put them in charge of everything, it would be great to allow them to handle many things.

An investment app is a sophisticated system that takes a lot of effort, technical expertise, and experience. This is why a professional app development agency must be hired for the job. Rest, you can always direct them or tell them about your ideas about the development.

Lastly, you must ensure that all your ideas and functions have solid grounds and you cover maximum areas never to go wrong with any aspect of the application. Know the audience you are targeting, know what they want and build accordingly for them, and it will just be a matter of time for you to succeed.

The era of investing apps and digital investments is just getting started, and you must not let the opportunity pass by unheard. Turn your idea into reality; make it count!