Once upon a time, saving for retirement was daunting. People had to either pay high fees for their bank’s mutual funds, or learn how to manage their investments directly on the stock market.

Luckily for savers everywhere, there are now services like WealthBar that make this easy as pie. WealthBar invests your savings in world-class index funds, and then does the important work of keeping your portfolio balanced and healthy.

While WealthBar has been building steam for years now, they recently decided it was time to Get Serious™ about their mobile apps. While their existing cross-platform React Native apps were functional, they weren’t great. That’s where we came in.

This spring, we designed and built fully native iOS and Android apps for WealthBar. We dug in to what WealthBar’s clients were asking for in an app, then went beyond that to consider what kind of features and presentation could actually help users save more, and be more successful at building wealth. A lot of investment apps focus on the day to day – or even hour to hour – of the stock market. Evidence shows that real wealth is actually built on the long term decisions, so we designed an app with that focus.

Of course, performance and usability are paramount for consumer-facing apps like WealthBar’s, so for this project we went the full-native route. Using Swift and Kotlin, we were able to build high-performance apps that make navigation a breeze. Native development also helped us integrate well with features like Face ID and password managers. These additions make good security hygiene easier than ever.

Meanwhile, a visual refresh brought the apps into 2018, adding a bit of personality to the UI while keeping things clean and clear.

The result? Two darn good apps, according to WealthBar clients:

Well thanks, uniquenickname72526185! Of course, it also matters what the team at WealthBar thought of our work. Luckily for us, WealthBar wrote about our collaboration on their blog, extensively quoted us, and called our team “the best in the west”. So overall, pretty great!

Of course, as with any “.0” release, there is much more in store. We have some great features on the roadmap – time to get back to work. 💰