A year ago here at Google, an engineer (Arun Mathew) and a user experience designer (Nick Fey) set out to build a Finance mobile application for Android that would both showcase the possibilities of this new mobile OS and be a lightning fast way for users to access their Google Finance portfolios. The original goal was to address the frustration of having to set up all the stocks you want to track when using a new mobile portfolio; we're excited to have delivered on this goal for our users. You will notice that the first time you open the Android app, your portfolio is automatically downloaded in the background and it continually syncs with the Google Finance when running, so any changes on the phone will be seen on the website.
As the application took shape we added additional features with the aim of allowing users to get stock quotes, market data and news as fast as possible. Highlights include real-time streaming quotes in your portfolio, rapid stock look-ups with search auto-suggestion, and 'recent quotes' to speed up receiving quotes on-the-go; for each stock there are detailed quotes, charts and news available. At the moment, this financial data is restricted to US exchanges only.
Throughout development we attracted additional engineers and designers, all volunteering their 20% time. A special thanks goes out to David Fuchs, David Ko, and Bob Rose for all the time and effort spent building the application, as well as to the many other engineers and designers that helped make this a product worth launching.
