Trade From Any Device: What Are Cross-platform Web Mobile Trading Platforms?

While desktop apps used to be the norm in the trading market, this has been changing in recent years. More and more developers and users have been exploring the opportunity to convert trading apps to web versions, and this trend is already enjoying success.

What’s the Current State of the Market?

The market for online trading platforms is expected to grow by almost $1 billion per year until 2026, according to current estimates. 

Web trading platforms are also attractive due to their profitability potential. Some of them have reportedly marked the highest revenue in their corresponding sectors in recent years. And while this trend used to be centered around the United States, this has been changing rapidly. The Asian continent has been a major adopter of web trading platforms, both in terms of providing solutions and interest from users.

Why Are Web Trading Platforms Climbing in Popularity?

Why are web trading platforms so successful though? Their popularity can be traced to several main factors. Many of them are related to convenience, but security is also a highlighted benefit of many web trading platforms.

Portability

One of the main drawing factors of web trading platforms is their portability resulting from their device independence. User can access their trading tools from any device capable of browsing the internet. 

And with mobile devices now accounting for more than 55% of the market, with desktops declining in recent years, this factor has been more and more attractive to traders. This has prompted companies like MetaQuotes to invest heavily in web-based solutions, with MetaTrader 5 currently boasting support for all major operating systems and devices.

The MetaTrader 5 Web Terminal takes things one step further by enabling terminal instances to be run locally on broker access servers instead of relying on one centralized processing point. Users are also able to get in touch with a live broker with just a few clicks.

MetaTrader 5 Web Terminal is available on any device and any platform.

It’s not just about accessing platforms from anywhere. The centralized, hosted nature of web trading platforms means that user data is available instantly even on new devices. This can free up the trader’s time, while also enabling organizations to scale up their operations. 

Processing Power

Another major advantage of web trading platforms is the independence from processing power. With desktop apps, traders were always limited by two main factors: the speed of their computers and their internet quality.

This is becoming irrelevant these days. All logic is executed remotely on a server, with the user just navigating a client with a visual interface. This means that a trader can operate on even a low-powered computer that can’t run anything beyond a web browser.

Internet speed is largely irrelevant at this point as well. Using a trading app means leveraging the internet capabilities of the platform itself, and those are usually well above what a regular user can afford.

Security

All data is stored on the platform itself, with the client merely accessing it from remote locations. The companies behind the biggest trading platforms on the market take their security seriously and have the resources to minimize the risk of breaches and data theft.

The tech market is constantly shifting to a cloud-oriented infrastructure. Spending on cloud services is projected to grow by over 20% in 2023 alone, continuing a trend that we’ve already been following for several years.

Ongoing Development

A web app doesn’t require updates. Users just have to log in and they are always presented with the newest version. This is a major advantage over desktop apps which require the user to keep them up to date manually. Even though desktop apps have built-in automatic updates, a large number of users continue to ignore update notifications and postpone them. As many as 40% of internet users don’t update their devices or software at all, according to at least one study. This is a significant number, in the context of the overall number of devices in use today. And since outdated software is a major attack vector for malicious operators, this means that many users are inherently not protected.