The 30-second iPhone finance app shootout: Apple vs. Daily Finance vs. Bloomberg
By Chris Ziegler 
posted Apr 19th 2009 4:00PM
posted Apr 19th 2009 4:00PM
We're no Wall Street wizards -- we're more Kevin Bacon's character in his bike messenger days in Quicksilver than Vin Diesel in his Ferrari days in Boiler Room -- but in the final analysis, one thing's very clear: the iPhone's built-in Stocks app sucks, which you don't really come to realize and appreciate until after you've played with these heavier-duty options from AOL and Bloomberg. It leads us to wonder why it's there to begin with, and furthermore, why they've continued to work on it for 3.0 by adding landscape mode. Like the equally-weak Weather app, Apple would be better served by cutting Stocks out of the firmware and leaving it to companies that have the know-how and the vested interest in producing a quality product (like, say, The Weather Channel in place of Weather). As for the battle between Bloomberg and Daily Finance, they're both fantastically detailed with tons of options for tracking your portfolio, checking out a variety of chart time ranges in landscape view, staying up on corporate and world news, and keeping tabs on global indexes. Ultimately, we'd say they're neck-and-neck; since they're free, we recommend you download and try them both. We preferred the way that Daily Finance presented news for individual stocks -- on their own tab to reduce clutter -- and liked the fact that you have far more news categories available to you. On the flipside, we marginally preferred the high-contrast visual appearance of Bloomberg -- it seemed just a little more "professional" to us. Either way, though, do yourself a favor and relegate Stocks to some unused page at the very back of your home screen.
The Bloomberg Finance app is available for International users while the Daily Finance is not. Pity as the Daily Finance looks really nice.
Not off to a good start, AOL.
I use Bloomberg and its great. Its simple and quick. Oh and the default stock app sucks!
if you jailbreak it you can hide permanent apps. think there is only like 3 good apps anyway included. you may as well just say " why doesn't apple just make all apps optional" man you are a shitty writer.
What does jailbreaking have to do with this? Come on now -- think -- what percentage of users are jailbreaking? Theoretically, for what percentage of the iPhone-using population is jailbreaking even practical?
yea and by your post its evident youre a great writer.. shut the f*** up people always say a guy is a bad writer because they disagree.. either apply for his job or go to a diff website, thats what i do if i go to a site with bad writers i dont stay and complain
@moe
You know, for being a "shitty writer," Chris uses capitalization and punctuation properly. How about you?
for one he has the attention span of a flea. he only replied to the first sentence. every single app apple put on the iphone has a much better version available on itunes. he writes crap to stir up shit. i am calling him on it. this and every article he has ever written would have been better off if someone else wrote it. even one of several other engadget writers.
@moe: Careful, you're very close to being banned. I don't tolerate personal attacks, and you need to get over the 5800 review (which, may I add, was published nearly three years after I started writing for this publication -- your first comment was two months ago). The review isn't changing.
@moe
Then don't read engadget if you hate the articles, instead of hating on Chris (Nice article Chris, BTW).
I disagree. While the offerings from Apple with respect to financial and meteorological applications might be quite limited in scope and detail, applications that go beyond this are very specialized. For example, I could really care less about details of the weather aside from current temperature/precipitation. My limited portfolio also minimizes my reliance on a heavy financial application. As such, the built in applications work well for me. In contrast, a business person with heavy reliance on financial software would definitely be ill-served by Apple's applications.
I can imagine I am not alone in this respect, and I think that is why Apple continues development on these bits. If the idea for them was to create the ultimate solution to the niche these apps fill, I feel they would do more to bring their own up to par. Perhaps they would even go a step further and outlaw these apps like they do with email and media applications. The point here is, Apple gives us the basics and lets developers fill the needs of those who require more functionality. That way, its a win-win for them.
I think they should have put these two apps up against the Stock App from 3.0. It is quite an improvement.
You're right, it's quite a bit better, but it's still not in the same league as the other two. For casual users it should be good enough, but I feel like "casual users" and "I need to check my portfolio from my phone" are incongruent statements!
I think that the stock app is more like a demo of how the iPhone uses 3G. It's enough to make the average user say, "gee, that's pretty cool that the iPhone can do that". Often times, us geeks forget that we demand a lot more out of our devices that the mass market does.=)
** when I said 3G, I meant wireless data in general. (EDGE counts. too.)
You know, I like the article, but shouldn't there be a disclosure that Engadget's parent company is AOL Time Warner?
I tried by calling 'em our corporate cousins, but yep, I can clarify!
The Bloomberg App is an excellent tool I enjoy using alot.....on my BB Storm .
been banned before for no good reason go ahead. does not change you are hack.
I hope you do. I hope you realize we all hate you. You know if you hate engadget so much don't comment. Our start your on site and hate on these guys. Ohh whats that you cant be bothered to hard. Now you know how Chris feels. GOD I AM SO MAD!!!
Banned for no good reason? Calling someone a shit writer and trolling isn't a good reason? Clearly your IQ is of a rather low grade, as is evident by your "5-year old" grade writing skills.
just storing my password, dont mind me
can i say they both suck? why? because they both don't have the ability to monitor anything of interest once you own a stock.
they are only useful at montioring stocks before you buy.
Once purchased, you get the current price but you have to compute the number of shares you own, the gain or loss,
and your tax rate based on hold period yourself.
But you do get the market cap. hey that makes you feel good. rock that number!
what a wonderful app.
Are there any stock apps with true real time streaming quotes as found in yahoo finance on the one's pc? Are there any apps that integrate say an etrade account with such real time quotes so we can buy and sell based on up to date quotes?
I like the built in stock app. It's light weight and really quick.
The bloomberg app is great too, but I don't use it as often since it is a little slow.
Most importantly, where's my slingplayer app!! I can use that to watch stock/business news on TV while at work.
You guys missed the #1 Paid stock app ... PortfolioLive ...
You can always tell quality by what people are willing to pay for. If what you need are fast, easy to use, accurate real time quotes ... then PortfolioLive is the cream of the crop. No charts but the devs are updating it almost weekly with advanced features ... support for shorting, multiple lots per positions, cash, configurable commission, easy to read stock screen with like 13 rows ... the list goes on and on.
The Thomson Reuters app that came out today is amazing!
A recently introduced finance App Dough is quite interesting.
Dough combines money management with Budget and Bill paying in an elegant easy to use interface.
http://dough.codebeyond.com
-Augustus
I couldn't download Daily Finance. Has it removed by Apple?