Fidelity App Not Working: Activity Freeze in 4.38 (2026)

Most brokerage app complaints are about charts, fees or navigation. This one is about the screen that tells you what your money did.

In app version 4.38, selecting Activities under iPadOS 26.6 causes app to lock up. Thus I cannot see transaction history and orders, and can cannot modify orders. That renders the app useless.

Today, I am unable to view any activity, including open orders and history, and I am unable to change any orders, which has cost me a lot of money today

We read 217 recent 1-3 star reviews of the Fidelity Investments app across Google Play and the App Store. There are two distinct problems in that set. One is acute, dated and still open. The other has been running for months and is not a bug at all.

How We Counted

We pulled the newest 1-3 star reviews from both stores and kept the ones with enough text to categorize, roughly 120 characters or more. That left 217 reviews: 149 from Google Play, dated 31 March to 12 August 2026, and 68 from the App Store, dated 30 July to 12 August 2026.

The two windows are very different lengths, and that matters for one conclusion below, so we are stating it up front rather than in a footnote. The App Store feed returned only the last two weeks. Any claim of the form "this happens on iPhone and not on Android" would be unsafe from this data. Claims about what is happening inside the last two weeks are safe on both platforms.

The star breakdown is milder than most sets we read: 139 one-star, 38 two-star, 40 three-star, so 64.1% one-star. That is not a set of people rage-uninstalling. A lot of these reviewers are long-term customers writing a detailed bug report and giving three stars while they do it.

The two store ratings are worth putting side by side, because they disagree more than any pair we have measured:

Same app, same version number, two thirds of a star apart. The App Store average rests on roughly fifteen times as many ratings, so it moves far more slowly, and the Play rating of 4.11 is unusually low for a major financial institution in the first place. Neither number tells you anything about the last two weeks, which is the entire point of reading the reviews.

The Acute Problem: Tapping Activity

13 reviews describe the app locking up specifically when opening the Activity, History or Orders screen. Eleven of those are on App Store version 4.38, and nine of the thirteen were posted between 3 and 12 August 2026. Four of them landed on a single day, 11 August.

Latest update introduced a new bug into system that causes it to crash when viewing activity in your some of your accounts on an iPhone Once you click on activity section the app freezes and will not allow any other windows to open

Running latest iOS and app versions. Every time when selecting the “activity” tab to check on orders the app freezes. Requires shutting down app and restarting.

Some accounts are not showing the activity history. It just spins and spins.

The reports are unusually precise for a freeze complaint. Reviewers name the tab, name the build, and several name the operating system version. Two independently report that it happens on some accounts and not others within the same login, which is a useful detail: it points at the data being rendered rather than at the screen itself.

This is also the cluster where reinstalling is confirmed not to help. Multiple reviewers report deleting and reinstalling the app before writing, which rules out a corrupted local install and leaves either the build or the account data.

Why That Particular Screen Matters

Activity is not a cosmetic tab. It is the list of what happened: filled orders, pending orders, transfers in flight, deposits clearing. Freezing there does not just hide information, it blocks the actions that live on the same screen.

Keeps freezing when trying to see activity in my Cash Management account and wouldn’t let me delete a transfer in time which is now causing me a hardship until next payday

Today, I am unable to view any activity, including open orders and history, and I am unable to change any orders, which has cost me a lot of money today because while the price was up could’ve sold, I was unab

Those are two different kinds of loss. One reviewer could not cancel a transfer before it executed. The other could not modify a live order while the price moved. In both cases the app was open, the login worked, and the specific screen holding the control was unresponsive.

We are reporting the financial consequences as claims rather than as verified events, because a review cannot establish what a trade would have done. What the review set does establish is that the frozen screen is the one carrying time-sensitive controls, which is why this cluster reads angrier than its size suggests.

The Chronic Problem: The Redesign Is The Complaint

Set the freeze aside and the largest theme in the set is not a malfunction. 59 reviews, 27.2%, are about the redesign itself: the layout, the navigation, the removal of the older view, and the direction of successive updates.

This is the finding we would have missed by looking for bugs. These reviewers are not saying the app is broken. They are saying it works and they can no longer use it efficiently.

Every update looses customized views. Many important data fields are no longer available to select for the views.

Ever since the latest update, no view preferences are saved or remembered, and it now takes more clicks to get anywhere

The version data rules out the usual explanation, which is that one bad build went out. The Android reviews in this cluster carry eight distinct build numbers, including five consecutive current ones: 4.33, 4.35, 4.36, 4.37 and 4.38. A complaint that survives five consecutive releases is not a regression waiting for a patch. It is the product direction, and the reviewers say so themselves. The most common single phrase in this cluster is some version of "every update makes it worse".

One older complaint recurs enough to note: the classic layout that used to be available as a fallback is gone, so the reviewers who had opted out of the new design were moved into it.

The App Forgets

Underneath the redesign cluster sits a narrower and more mechanical one. 13 reviews describe settings that do not persist across sessions. Column layouts, sort order, view preferences, real-time quote acknowledgements and device trust all reset.

It seems like the ui layout changes every time I open this app. I dont want 10+ columns of metrics on my mobile phone. I configure settings, which then reset to default every time I close the app.

I can't see/ scroll my positions anymore. every time I log out, when I log back in things are reset to alphabetical order.

When viewing All Positions, the data for some positions/rows doesn't line up with the column headers. All the data on the affected lines is shifted one column to the right.

The last one is a different class of problem from the others and worth separating. A sort preference that resets is an annoyance. A positions table where the values are shifted one column to the right is a display that shows you the wrong number next to the right label, on a screen full of money.

The same forgetting shows up on the login path, where it costs more than convenience:

Literally every time I sign in, I need to send a verification code. Why include a "remember this device" option if it never works?

FaceID resets every once in a while and I have to log in using username and pw. Imagine doing that every time your want to see your portfolio at a glance 2. Remember this device when logging in doesn't actually remember the dev

at least once a week I have to reestablish my face ID recognition. I keep getting a message saying that the app has detected a change in my face ID settings

Three separate mechanisms, one symptom. The device trust flag does not stick, so a code is sent every session. The Face ID registration invalidates itself weekly. And one reviewer reports the login screen appearing after a successful login, which is dismissible without re-entering anything.

Sometimes the app logs me in and then immediately shows the login screen again. But I can then close the second login screen and I'm still logged in.

Now displays your full saved username on the login screen for anyone to see.

That last one is a small detail with an outsized meaning on a brokerage app. A saved username rendered on the lock screen is not a security breach, but it is the kind of thing a financial app is normally careful about, and a reviewer noticing it is a reviewer who has stopped giving the app the benefit of the doubt.

Moving Money

43 reviews, 19.8%, are about moving money rather than about viewing it: deposits, transfers, check deposit, credit card payments, holds. This cluster is where the individual reports get most concrete.

When you try to pay your Fidelity credit card all you get is a white screen on the most recent version of the app so you have no means of paying off your credit card.

I set up recurring deposits believing the money was being invested, but for 10 weeks it was simply sitting in SPAXX

The second one describes something that is not a crash and not a bug report in the ordinary sense. Money arrived, sat in the default cash position, and did not go where the reviewer believed they had directed it. Whether that is a product behaving as designed or an interface failing to communicate is exactly the question the reviewer is raising, and it is the sort of thing that only surfaces ten weeks later.

Devices That Stopped Being Supported

11 reviews, 5.1%, are from people whose device was dropped. The pattern is familiar from other financial apps: an older phone or tablet that worked last month stops being supported, and the app becomes unusable rather than degraded.

App has been running fine for year on my iPad 12 Pro, all other finance app still run fine, someone has now randomly decided it shouldn’t be supported

This is the same class of change we documented when Chase cut off older Android versions. The engineering reasoning is usually sound and the customer experience is uniformly bad, because the account is still there and the door is now shut.

The Workaround Buried In The Reviews

19 reviews, 8.8% of the set, mention using the Fidelity website instead of the app, and almost all of them mention it as the thing that got them unstuck rather than as a complaint.

4th day I can't log in. I have to use Fidelity main site.

That is the single most useful line in the entire set, and it is buried in one-star reviews. The desktop and mobile web experience is a separate codebase from the app. When the app freezes on Activity, when the login loop repeats, when a payment screen renders blank, the same account is reachable in a phone browser.

Step 1: Work Out Which Of The Two Problems You Have

These have different fixes and different odds. If the app opens, logs in, and then locks up when you tap Activity, History or Orders, you are in the acute cluster: 11 of those 13 reviews are on version 4.38, and it is a build-level problem you cannot fix from your side. If the app works but you cannot find things, or your columns and sort order reset every time, you are in the chronic cluster, and nothing you do will change it because it is the current design.

Step 2: Use The Web Version First, Not Last

Sign in at Fidelity's website in a phone browser before troubleshooting anything. 19 reviewers in our set report this working while the app did not, including for the exact operations the app was blocking: viewing activity, modifying orders and paying a card. The reviewers who spent days on reinstalls first are the ones still writing angry reviews in August.

Step 3: Do Not Reinstall To Fix A Freeze

Several reviewers in the Activity freeze cluster deleted and reinstalled the app before writing, and none of them report it fixing anything. A freeze that reproduces on a specific tab, on a specific build, across multiple devices is not caused by your local install. Reinstalling also costs you your saved login and your biometric registration, which the app is already having trouble holding on to.

Step 4: If A Code Arrives Every Single Time, Check The Device Trust Setting Once, Then Stop Trying

The reviews suggest the device trust flag is not persisting rather than being set incorrectly. Set it once, deliberately, on the device you use most. If codes keep arriving, that is the reported failure mode and not something you are doing wrong. It is worth one attempt because it is the only lever on your side, and it is not worth an afternoon.

Step 5: If Money Is Involved, Do Not Wait For The App

If you have a transfer to cancel, an order to modify or a deposit that appears stuck, treat the app as unavailable and go to the web version or the phone line immediately. The two most costly reports in our set both involve a time-limited action sitting behind a frozen screen. Time-limited actions are the one category where waiting for a fix has a price.

What This Set Is Not About

Almost nothing here is about Fidelity as a brokerage. Exactly 1 of the 217 reviews is about fees, advisors or the company rather than the software.

For comparison, in our read of the Amazon shopping app 36.6% of complaints were about the retailer rather than the software, in the Best Buy set it was 13.1%, and in the Starbucks set 5.0%. At well under one percent, this is the most software-concentrated review set we have measured. These are customers who are satisfied enough with the institution to stay and are complaining specifically about the software they have to use to reach it.

We also want to flag what we did not conclude. Because the App Store window covers only two weeks, we cannot say the Activity freeze is an iPhone problem. We can say that within the overlapping two weeks, the reports naming version 4.38 and the Activity tab are concentrated on iOS, and that the Android complaints in the same window are dominated by the layout and persistence issues instead.

The Short Version

Fidelity's 4.79 App Store rating is built on 3.2 million ratings collected over many years and will not move for a two-week problem. Its 4.11 Google Play rating is the lower number, and it is closer to what the recent reviews describe.

There are two things happening. Version 4.38 freezes for a group of users when they open the Activity, History or Orders screen, which is where pending orders and in-flight transfers are controlled, and the reports cluster tightly into the first twelve days of August. Separately, and for much longer, the largest complaint in the set is the redesign itself: five consecutive builds of layout changes, preferences that reset every session, and a device trust setting that keeps forgetting.

The workaround that most reviewers find eventually, and too late, is the website.

You can read the full negative review breakdown for Fidelity on Android and Fidelity on iOS, or see the trust check for Fidelity. For how it compares with the rest of the category, see our read of stock trading app reviews, and for a brokerage where lockouts rather than layout drive the complaints, Robinhood.

Methodology

We collected the newest 1-3 star reviews for the Fidelity Investments app from Google Play and the App Store, deduplicated by review ID, and kept those with at least 120 characters of text. The resulting set is 217 reviews: 149 Android dated 31 March to 12 August 2026, and 68 iOS dated 30 July to 12 August 2026. Clusters were assigned by matching complaint language, and reviews mentioning more than one theme are counted in each, so the cluster percentages do not sum to 100. Version attribution uses the build recorded on each review by the store. Quotes are reproduced exactly as written, including spelling and punctuation, and each was verified against the source text before publication. Ratings and version numbers were read from the stores on 13 August 2026.