Opinion: The rise of Android

Betcade CEO David Chang looks at some of the key hurdles hampering Android growth, and how they can be overcome  

With mobile gambling becoming increasingly competitive and user acquisition costs skyrocketing in parallel, operators will need to think about how to maximize underserved platforms to succeed. As the world’s most popular mobile operating system, Android has huge potential to increase a casino operator’s mobile reach. [private]

To date, nearly all operators have been disappointed in the performance of Android. Frustrated by the problems of discovery, distribution, and payment for apps on the operating system, many operators have decided it’s simply easier to bypass Android as a platform altogether or to put minimal resources against it. With new companies like Betcade and others aiming to solve these issues, 2016 is the year that Android will make a major impact on the gaming industry.

Android is by far the top mobile operating system (OS) throughout the world, and owns 66% of the smartphone market in the US and 71% of the top five European nations (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK). Prior to my work in the gambling industry, I spent years in the games industry as an executive and then a founder and CEO of online and mobile games companies. There’s no question that games dominate mobile apps categories both in terms of dollars and innovation, and given the games industry’s major crossover with gambling we can look at this vertical as a model for what gaming on Android could be.

Looking at our experience in games, Android has slightly lower revenue per user than iOS. However, given the dominance of the overall platform, any game developer who wants to survive let alone succeed in the market has to have an Android strategy. In games, the revenue mix for iOS vs Android is 60/40. In gaming, some gaming operators I talk to are saying it’s more like 95/5. That’s an astronomical difference. I refuse to believe that real-money gaming users are any different than traditional games users and I strongly believe that operators could be making at a minimum 40% of their gross mobile revenue from the Android platform, and in doing so, increasing their overall revenue.

Barriers to success

Think of the current mobile user experience for non-gaming content. Users browse categories or search for apps, view a consistent set of information and reviews for every app, and with one tap install the desired app on their devices. They set payments up once and never have to do it again, no matter how many apps they download. Most importantly, the experience offered by native apps is so superior that consumers have largely abandoned the mobile web and now prefer to consume more than 80% of their mobile content via apps.

Prior to, and the impetus of, founding Betcade, was this: I spent the last several years launching and growing Gamblit Gaming. Gamblit’s goal is to bring the interactive entertainment game experience to casinos, and as a result attract millennial generation players. As we were building our audience acquisition strategies, I realized that reaching players on Android as a gaming company was going to be nearly impossible.

Google does not allow real-money gaming apps on the Google Play store. At all. Right now, if a player wants to play a real-money game on their Android device, they might do a search and get taken to an affiliate site. These sites vary so widely in quality that a prospective player could perceive a security risk or actually encounter one. From there, they are taken to an HTML site where they can download the mobile app. Usability experts will tell you that you’re losing anywhere from 30-80% of users between every step, and we already know how users feel about the mobile web.

After all of this they have to register and set up their payment information with every single app they download. It’s an extremely cumbersome process to even find an app, and then an even more cumbersome process to register, deposit, and play. Contrast this with the very easy experience users get in every other app category, and there’s the reason that Android is only accounting for that abysmal 5% of mobile revenue.

While the situation on Android is certainly worse, the iOS situation is not without its problems. It’s true that you can get gambling apps on the App Store. However, they’re not promoted anywhere on the store or even visible in any category. Users have to know they are there and search specifically for them, or arrive at the App Store from the casino site. Payment on the iOS platform is still just as clunky. Furthermore, you have essentially a single point of distribution for mobile, which creates a huge risk for operators.

Opening the Android market

I recently spoke on a panel at a conference focused on innovation in mobile gaming. There’s a lot of forward thinking at the app level around conversion, usability, personalization and data that’s very exciting for the industry. Gaming is also a unique business, with unique issues and, of course, regulated content so the innovation we see in other mobile verticals will be modified or completely re-thought for our very challenging industry. Further, the bigger problems of discovery, distribution, and payments are just not solvable at an operator level, or through our existing, very limited, Android ecosystem. This will require some of us to step out of our operator roles and fundamentally shift the way we think about users.

Betcade is a just a start – in creating the first gaming app store we are addressing the structural problems of discovery, download, and payment on the Android platform, and in doing so creating a viable ecosystem for operators to thrive in. In order for Android to fully blossom, operators will need to take their forward thinking onto the Android platform, offering a best-in-class entertainment experience that Android users deserve through an ecosystem specifically created for them.

Bio: David Chang is the co-founder and CEO of Betcade and formerly head of industry relations at Gamblit Gaming