Mobile Gambling’s App Bloat Issue

“App bloat” may not sound like a serious problem, but if software companies have any hope of trying to stay competitive in their industry, it can quickly become a critical issue. The term app bloat refers to the way that the size of an app can balloon because of images, videos, animations, software development kits (SDKs) and fonts that have been added during production.

Advanced graphics, high definition videos and sophisticated SDKs have obvious benefits, but they also tend to have more than a few drawbacks that are not always obvious. For example, larger apps tend to be clunky and slow. They crash more often, and they tend to give users a worse experience than their smaller counterparts.

How App Bloat Can Happen

App developers have to stay competitive, which means they can’t skimp on all of the things that help create a great user experience. This also means they need to keep their apps as lean as possible. In fact, research has shown that once an app hits 100MB, it also hits a massive wall and installations can drop as much as 65 percent or more. This means it is vital for developers to understand all of the mechanisms that contribute to app size and the best ways to minimize it.

In general, one of the biggest culprits of a dramatic increase in app size is images. Research firms have studied apps from several genres and found that images alone can contribute to over half of an app’s size. The remaining common culprits are code that has not been trimmed down, an excess of SDKs, too many videos and an excess of fonts. Because of this, mobile gaming companies that are striving for growth and expansion, especially ones in the online gambling market, have to consistently stay on alert and vigilantly monitor their applications to keep them as lean as possible.

The Impact Of App Bloat On Mobile Gambling

Slots are by far the most popular mobile gambling games on the market. Incidentally, this also means that they are the most susceptible to the problem of app bloat. Developers have to make sure they are constantly coming out with slot titles that are flashier and more exciting than any other rival gaming companies, because these are the features that make new slots popular and exciting. It can be incredibly difficult to continually increase the quality of graphics, cut scenes and animations without also increasing loading times as well as the potential for frustrating amounts of lag.

For many online casinos, one solution is to offer a web-based mobile app that is specifically optimized to deliver a consistently smooth and high-quality experience. One way to achieve this is to have an app that only loads content on demand rather than automatically downloading it to players’ smartphones or tablets. Unfortunately, there are still a few issues with this solution. One major drawback is that, because content would be loaded only on demand, there would be no cache to provide quicker loading times. In addition to slightly slower loading times, players would also be required to use more data than normal each time they booted up the app.

Other companies have a different approach. There are some firms that report that they actually have a dedicated team of workers that are always tasked with making sure every program in the company’s portfolio is as lean and “ruthlessly efficient” as possible. This has been proven to have a decidedly positive impact on install numbers.

As the real money mobile betting app industry continues to expand and technology continues to advance, software developers will have to become even more creative and innovative if they want to get around the app bloat issue.