Every self-respected online gambler has tried online casino at least once. I mean, how could we not, it’s awesome! Online casino was originally sold to us with the promise that we were no longer restricted to physical casinos, we could play slots, blackjack and roulette wherever we are, but it wasn’t until mobile casino became as big as it did that this promise was finally fulfilled. As long as you had access to wi-fi or a 3G or 4G network, you could, quite literally, play wherever you were, no questions asked! Wanna spin some slots while waiting for the bus? Done! Wanna bet on red in the dentist’s office? Boom! Mobile casino is pretty much every casino lover’s wet dream… At least in theory. In practice, there are a few issues, the largest of which being that most online casinos tend to be pretty limited.
Online casinos have dozens upon dozens of slots, and so many variations of roulette, blackjack and other games that there’s literally no way you couldn’t find at least one or two which are perfect for you. Mobile casino, on the other hand, doesn’t usually have more than 100 slots and one or two version of the more popular games. A single look at a list of mobile online casinos is enough to prove that pretty clearly. Of course, that’s still not a small amount, but one has to wonder where that discrepancy comes from. On one hand, we’ve got the technical limitations. Most online slots these days are programmed on HTML-5, which is an awesome programming language for web apps and is used by many of the most popular websites, such as YouTube and Facebook. However, as with any programming language, it’s not directly compatible with mobile devices – you can’t just open up something constructed on HTML-5 on something other than your computer, since it wasn’t built to do that. As such, most, if not all casino games need to be rebuilt from the grounds up on a different programming language which has been specifically designed to be compatible with the mobile platform, and that can be a messy process. Some languages only work on Android, others only on Apple. If you ever see a game that’s only available on one platform, this is why.
And then there’s other issues, such as redesigning the slot with the mobile platform in mind. Sometimes the interface needs to be changed in order to accommodate the touch screen. The developers also need to take into account the large variety of mobile devices – a slot they build for mobile must be compatible with a large variety of devices, from phones to tablets. And let us not forget about licensing issues – sometimes, when a certain property is licensed for a slot, the license only applies for online casinos, with physical and mobile requiring separate deals. Overall, there’s a whole lot of little details that go into the crafting of each slot for mobile, so instead of attacking the providers and questioning just why the amount of games on mobile isn’t as large as that on desktop, we should be rather grateful that we’re getting as many mobile games as we are.