Had a lot of problems with the App (Android) today. Feel I need to provide the feedback because it’s cost me money.
Today the markets are dipping hard, so I wanted to sell a few stocks.
First I tried selling a US stock. Now, it am in the UK and the US markets haven’t opened yet, so that’s not possible, but I hadn’t realised this yet (it’s a tiring morning) but the app did not behave well here and it looked like it was crashing/struggling with the sell process instead of just saying “Markets are closed”. On the “Sell” form you enter the # of shares to sell, then click Review. On the Review form however it showed “0” shares. It appeared to have failed to copy the number across from the previous page. The “Confirm Sell” button is still available to press, which is confusing because you can’t sell “0” shares. Clicking it does nothing, but also doesn’t report an error, or ask you to check anything. Several bad UX notes here.
When I realised the US market was closed I went instead to sell a UK stock I have. In the Sell form, selected my shares count, then tried to Review it but wouldn’t move on. I had a constantly spinning icon telling me to wait. I went back and forth a few times, but gave up after 5 minutes. My data connection is fine, it’s WiFi and everything other data-dependent process on my phone is working. I went all the way back to the stock review page and saw that the graph was out of date, not presenting the last 20 minutes of data. It was just a horizontal line, as if the stock had been suspended (which it hasn’t). Was the backend system frozen? Where are the error messages telling me the system isn’t responding? How am I supposed to use this if the forms don’t react properly, or let me know that something’s wrong or not possible? I was constantly wondering if I wasn’t filling it in properly.
I restarted the app, and then it would no longer let me log in because it said “An overlay has been detected. For security reasons…”. What overlay could it be referring to? I don’t have anything else open that overlays anything. No Messenger or other apps that use overlay features. Literally nothing else was open as far as I could see. I closed the app, checked nothing else was running again, opened FreeTrade and again the same warning message. I was able to log in, by being quicker than the message about the overlay, but still couldn’t sell anything. The forms were still not responding.
I restarted the app a third time, and this time no overlay warning, I opened the sell form, and managed to sell. This all took me 15 minutes. In that 15 minutes the stock had fallen another 2%. That’s cost me money. I’m unimpressed.
I would be happy to see a website interface. I also started using another provider (unnamed to avoid breaking community rules) purely to buy a share that FreeTrade doesn’t yet support, and their website allows me an alternative portal to my portfolio should the app malfunction. There doesn’t appear to be FreeTrade website for me to administrate my portfolio. Is there one coming?
I know this is a bit of a rant,apologies for that. But when you’re managing people’s 5-figure portfolios you cannot have poorly performing interfaces or malfunctioning processes. They should be completely rock solid.
