The evolution of the mobile casino

Mobile Casinos came about thanks to advances in smartphone technology and the fact that millions of people use smartphones nowadays. Surprisingly, they have been around for the best part of a decade now as the mobile gaming world is constantly evolving to meet players ever growing expectations.

First Mobile Slots

It was in 2005 that the first casino game was released on a mobile phone. It was called PubFruity and it was programmed in Java. It was a fairly basic game by today's standards as it only featured three reels with three rows and some very simple graphics. An interesting thing about this game is that you had to pay for it to play it but there were no money rewards, only virtual rewards and the only money you lost was for the purchase of the game itself. Throughout this time, players could not win any real money on mobile phones. The programming language Java was a big stumbling block here as it was quite tricky to code in and it did not help matters that different phones ran different types of the Java platform. A lot of time was spent on adapting games to different mobile platforms rather than producing better games for players.

Rise of the Smartphone

It was not until smartphones were first introduced that games began to become bigger, better, and easier to program for a variety of different mobile handsets. The iPhone was released in 2007 and this made a lot of online casinos sit up and take notice as it was an entirely new platform on which to play games on. The App Store soon followed in 2008 and Android also came out with their own smartphone as well as the Android Market. It was around this time that online casinos started to set up downloadable games for players. Unlike today, where you can just click on a game and it will automatically download, install, and then start. It was quite different back then as you had to download a file from the casino website itself and then install it. However, these games were a significant step for the mobile casino industry as they enabled players for the first time to deposit money in mobile slots.

Mobile Casinos

Games became easier to play and quicker to download and with the release of HTML5, this paved the way for games to be released on desktop PCs as well as mobile devices. Online casinos started to develop their games in HTML5 as it was really easy to just port games from online casino sites to their mobile casino sites. This was a huge step in the evolution of mobile casinos and one where some online casinos began devoting all of their attention to the mobile market instead. Nowadays, it is possible to visit online casinos on your smartphone and they will have a dedicated mobile version of their site that is fully responsive and easy to interact with via a touchscreen. It is also possible to deposit and withdraw money when you log into your account and games are instantly available without the need to download any additional software.

What is the next step for mobile casinos? Perhaps tapping into the lucrative wearable technology market where players could really gamble while on the go! Or even the VR market where Microgaming recently tested out a virtual version of roulette that was a huge success with the general public. Either way, the mobile gaming industry is growing exponentially and mobile casinos will definitely be a part of this growth so long as they stay one step ahead of technology!

For further information on online casinos, please check out this article.