Why on earth are we blogging about switching from Apple to Android?

We made the mobile switch from Apple to Android because Apple just isn’t very good at the internet. We love Apple’s hardware, and some of their software. All of our Sydney staff use Mac Books. But when it comes to having everything accessible in the cloud, Apple falls short. 10 years ago iTunes was pretty cool, but there’s no reason it should still be the application that ties your Apple life together. Working out where your files live between your iPhone, iPad, iCloud, and iTunes is too complicated. We can “see” Google Drive, but we can’t “see” iCloud. This makes us nervous.

Google (Android) has always been an internet company, not a consumer product manufacturer like Apple. Their ad business and their app business talk to one another brilliantly. Everything Google does is in the cloud. They’re even becoming an ISP. It’s funny to read about people’s (waning) resistance to the cloud when for 10 years now, Gmail has been the ultimate cloud product. Initially, Gmail’s best feature was their storage. Whenever we needed to store something we had to find later, we chucked it in Gmail. It hasn’t failed us for a decade.

Now, we run Sharesight on Google Apps so when we booted up our new Android mobile, all it took was a login to our personal Google account and a login to our Sharesight Google account and boom - everything was pulled into the phone (we were sitting on a bench with a donut in our hand at Westfield at the time). What's more is that you can log in to nearly every third party app using your Google details. Apple still requires you to plug your device into computer (and if we're wrong about this, well then they didn't make it simple enough to be 100% sure). “Sync your device with iTunes” and “Authorise this device?” were pop-ups we got sick of seeing.

Google’s internal cloud “handshakes” are a parallel to the achievements Sharesight is making for investors, accountants, and financial advisers.

Presumably you’ve chosen your broker because you like their research or their low-cost execution. You’ve chosen your accountant for another set of reasons. Maybe a mate referred you. Maybe you’re using an SMSF for property investing. The list of personal financial "nodes" goes on and on. We file this under a category we call “life admin.”

It’s 2014. Your “life admin” data should flow seamlessly from one professional and one platform to the next. While Sharesight can track your assets beautifully on its own, you’re not getting the full value of our product unless you’ve connected your broker or connected your portfolio to Xero. And our sharing feature means that you can give anyone access to your portfolio, with two mouse clicks.

Let us worry about making sure your data is securely shared between financial apps. We’ll leave you to decide which ones to use.