Native Apps vs. Instant Play: Which One is Better for Online Games?

Mobile apps are the new black. Much like in the "dot com" years, entrepreneurs are now creating apps for various services, which users need to download and install on their phones. Apps are everywhere, and there is an app for everything - or, as Steve Jobs used to say, "there's an app for that". This is especially true for games - the majority of today's games are released as individual apps. But is this really necessary? Do players have to download an app every time they want to play a game, or is there a way in which players can simply play in a mobile browser window, like in the golden age of Flash games?

"Web apps" are a thing

Since Flash is out of the question - mobile OSs and Adobe itself have dropped support for the mobile version of the Flash player a while ago - developers have found an alternative to native apps: HTML5. The biggest progress was made in the world of real money games, as they are not very well seen by the leading app marketplaces.

This is why the All Slots Casino, http://www.allslotscasino.com, has not released a native app for any mobile OS but has chosen to offer its players a web-based mobile interface. And it has quite a few advantages over native apps. The All Slots Mobile Casino is simple to access - it doesn't have to be downloaded and installed, or even updated. Players can simply visit the All Slots Casino website, log on to their account (which they can create through the downloadable suite or a desktop browser), and play one of its over 100 browser games. The platform provided by the All Slots Casino is not very demanding from a hardware point of view and runs on any mobile device with an HTML5-capable web browser. Which makes it the perfect cross-platform solution for casual games.

Not all games can run in a browser window

The majority of games played by mobile users are simple puzzles, casino games, word games, and their likes. But not all of them, of course. There are many that demand much more hardware resources to provide the best possible experience to their players. While Candy Crush could easily run in a browser, Vainglory (for example) could not. HTML5 is a great development platform, but it lacks some of the benefits of native apps: the deeper interaction, the better integration with the operating system, and the better access to the smartphone's hardware offered by the OSs APIs.

HTML5 is a perfect solution for simpler games, but is not yet as flexible and powerful as it could become - thus is is not the perfect solution for all games just yet. But it is continuously improved, much like Flash was in its time. We can expect it to become a much more flexible and versatile solution in the future. Until then, we'll have no choice but to download and install apps, even for the simplest games we want to play.