Any war will show you that freedom is not free, but for this month, to honor the 250th anniversary of the United States, usage of Appvestr® is FREE! I’ve removed the paywalls so you can both view the portfolio discovered AND automate trades to build that portfolio with Robinhood.

I built Appvestr® to apply the investor practice of “investing in companies whose products you buy” to the mobile app domain. It makes good sense because you’re buying stock in something you use and like, so why not parlay that brand loyalty (or more likely spending on that brand) into stocks that might pay you back with dividends or growth. For example, if you like Crest toothpaste, you should buy P&G stock and in the mobile app space, if you have the Oral-B app installed, then you should also buy P&G stock.

This is Appvestr®’s uniqueness: it quickly discovers apps made by publicly traded companies, shows you the portfolio, and then automates the creation of that portfolio with an investment house.

I started this app shortly after our book on mobile app development came out just over ten years ago. While I was gainfully employed, my spare-time hobby vision was to make this accessible to many via a low investment fund threshold. It wasn’t until fractional share investing, such as Robinhood, came along that I manually invested $2 per stock discovered back in 2020. I blogged about the performance here.

This year, Robinhood introduced Agentic accounts and implemented an MCP service, and now I had the ability to automate the creation of the Appvestr® portfolio – here’s a two-minute video of the experience! Try before you buy!

If you’re intrigued by the Model Context Protocol (MCP) aspect of this app, I did find IBMer Chris Hay’s video and code super helpful in proving out the basic MCP OAuth flow. My Android app also added some Kotlin code for the MCP capabilites, largely generated by Gemini/Google AI with referential input from the above link and with very little help from the Robinhood team (other than the fantastic idea of making an MCP server available).

Because I’m a long-time DevOps fan, Appvestr® also has some automated bug reporting via an integration to Git Issues. In my speaker circuit and IBM TopGun instructor days, I often repeated the phrase “all software has bugs” and used to reflect upon IBM’s history with bugs and how the word “bug” came to be (yes, actual moth getting stuck in the hardware!):

Rather than mysterious bug reporting procedures (if any ability at all to report them), it’s nice to have it built in to the app. For me, the standard has always been the “rage shake” which you can try for yourself in Instagram to report a problem. Just shake the phone while Instagram is up and see what happens! There are commercially available versions in Instabug, Shake, and others.