Acorns App Critique

During our second week of class, we were given the assignment to find an app that we enjoy using and write a review of it.

Acorns is a mobile investing app with a few interesting ways to deposit money into your Acorns account.  There are also many benefits to using Acorns as one of your investing platforms. 

To start setting up your account, you first need to make an account within the app and verify your email address.  Once your Acorns account has been created, you then link your debit and/or credit cards.  This allows the Acorns platform to watch your account for charges that it will then round up.  During the account creating process, you choose a pin number that will allow you access into your Acorns app.  On more modern cell phones, you can use your fingerprint to access your account.  After all your information has been validated, you are prompted to further fill out your profile.  Part of that process is selecting how you would like your funds invested.  You are presented with 5 options; Conservative, Moderately Conservative, Moderate, Moderately Aggressive, and Aggressive.  With each selection comes its own risk and reward.

The main feature that attracted me to Acorns, is the ability to deposit your “change” when making purchases with your debit and/or credit cards.  The app calculates the change by rounding the charged amount up to the nearest dollar and depositing that “round-up” into your Acorns account.  You can further improve your investment opportunities with options to double, triple, or quadruple your round up deposits.  Other noteworthy deposit features include daily, weekly, or monthly recurring deposits.  A third feature that allows even more money to be deposited is “Found Money.”  This feature is used to incentivize shopping at different vendors.  Some vendors offer flat amount deposits in addition to the round up.  An example is Uber, who offers an additional $0.50 deposit per ride when you pay with a card that has been linked to an Acorns account.  Other vendors, such as Groupon, offer a deposit of a percentage of your purchase.  A final option to fund your account is by referrals.  When you refer enough people and they fund their accounts, you receive $500.  When you are ready to withdraw funds from your account, you simply go to the withdraw menu, state how much you want to withdraw, and send the request.  Within a few days, your funds will be deposited into the account you configured for your profile.

The app itself is very beautiful.  The color theme is very pleasing to the eyes.  There is a main menu that is full of single word sub menus.  There is an area where you can read articles about that discuss everything you would need to know about money. The articles cover a variety of topics such as establishing a savings, how to make investment decisions, or common mistakes made with investment accounts.  Another great feature of Acorns, is the ability to sign into a web version of the app on your computer.  This allows for better visibility on a larger screen.

While I am very impressed with the app, there is always room for improvement.  The first thing I would change would be to have a list of tutorials for the app presented somewhere very visible.  There are some features that are not intuitive.  Another fix that needs to be made is to make it easier to change how you want your money invested.  The menu for that process is nested a few levels deep in other menus.  It took me several weeks to figure out where I needed to go to change that setting.  Beyond those two deficiencies, there is not much more that needs to be improved on.