What does the desktop companion do that the web app can't?
Four things, and they all come from the same root cause: a browser tab cannot see outside itself and stops existing when you close it. The desktop app can take screenshots of your trading platform, record video, receive a live market feed, and keep working with the browser shut.
In the order you are likely to care about them.
Automatic chart screenshots and video. The big one. A browser cannot photograph another application — that is a security boundary, not a missing feature. The desktop companion takes them at the moment of the fill, from the monitor you nominate, and attaches them to the right trade without you touching anything. See what the app captures.
There are three ways a picture reaches a trade, and only one of them needs the desktop app:
| | Web | Desktop | |---|---|---| | Attaching an image to a trade yourself | yes | yes | | A snapshot sent by your platform's hotkey through the webhook — NinjaTrader, ATAS, Sierra Chart | yes | yes | | Automatic capture at the moment of the fill — stills or video | no | yes |
The middle row is the one people miss. It puts real chart screenshots into the web app with no desktop companion at all — but you press the key, so it fires when you say rather than when a trade fills. The bottom row is the only thing the desktop app is required for, and it covers stills as well as video, not video alone.
A live market feed, rather than the request-and-wait pattern a browser is limited to.
Tick recording, which is what makes chart replay run on real ticks rather than on candles reconstructed after the fact.
It keeps running when the browser is closed. Everything above depends on something being alive at the moment your trade fills. A closed tab is not.
What it does not change: the journal, the analytics, the Stats desk, the Playbook, the Calendar, the goals — all of that is identical in both, because both read the same account. The desktop app is not a bigger version of the product. It is the same product plus the four capabilities a browser cannot provide.
