OMG, what’s with stocks apps on mobile phones?

My memories of the days when mobiles were starting to become a thing and everyone was snapping up some sort of PalmPilot or PDA, one prominent app that was offered on those PDAs and early phones (and RIM pager?) was stock price look-up app.

Back then, buying and trading stocks by normal plebes was getting to be a thing. Or at least, back in those heady days of the rise of Bay Area bros making millions off of IPOs and folks on TV and the internet flogging stocks, folks promoted stock trading as a thing.

But was stock tracking and trading so prevalent that _every_ mobile device needed an app? And back then, the apps were prominently promoted. [Tho, my memory of when they started showing up might be hazy, as I can’t seem to find any screenshots of such apps from those days. I sure feel that the prevalence of stock price apps bothered me all these years.]

<shakes head>

The iPhone still comes with a stocks price tracking app (see it also in the iPhone launch photo above). And now I read that they were even considering an investing feature.

Apple came close to creating an investing feature for the iPhone that would’ve let users buy and sell stocks directly on the device

from: Apple reportedly stopped short of bringing a stock trading feature to iPhone (The Verge)

In any case, is my grumpiness around this just because I don’t follow stock prices? Do you use the app regularly? Am I just the anomaly?

[and then I see this hand-made ESP32 powered a stock tracker 🙄]