This answer will depend very much on whether you’re talking about the retail forex or the institutional segment. And yet, the lines between the two are becoming increasingly blurry as retail traders reach new levels of sophistication and institutional ones are wanting to take advantage of the more modern and more affordable solutions that are being build for the retail community.
For institutional traders that trade in a professional capacity rather than as a hobby, desktop applications will always be needed to some point. Generally, when it comes to professional software, mobile applications don’t serve very well as a replacement. They are complimentary, not alternatives. I doubt you will ever see a designer doing UX mockups on his iPhone rather than using PhotoShop on his desktop. Similarly, smartphones will never be the place to code algorithms or do really hardcore technical analysis. For the retail community though, it’s a different story. You could easily imagine many retail traders spending more and more of their time checking the markets on their mobile devices rather than on their desktop apps, and you have even seen certain stock trading platforms coming out that are mobile first (or mobile only) like Robinhood.io.
As retail traders become more educated though, they will face the same problems as more professional-grade traders and require more tools to analyze trading opportunities than what a mobile device can typically offer (which has some limitations due to the size of the screen), and so while mobile certainly will enjoy a bigger uptake going forward, it will be difficult for mobile applications to ever completely displace the desktop experience.
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