When Apple unveiled its advertising campaign to mark the arrival of the App Store, which launched alongside the iPhone 3G back in 2008, few outside of the technology space had heard of the word before. Of course, we were all familiar with the concept – apps were software, and were most commonly referred to as programs on desktop systems.
Yet this snappy word would go on to revolutionize the way we used our phones and other mobile devices. The slogan of that initial advertising campaign “there’s an app for that!”, has come to ring more true than Apple could ever have supposed.
Today there are some 1.6 million apps in the App store, and 3.55 million in rival Android’s Google Play Store. These encompass all manner of categories – from education to fitness, social to medical – and have gradually become the dominant means by which we typically interact with digital platforms and services over the past decade.
The Rise of Mobile Gaming
Of course there’s one type of app that is more popular than any other, save social media, and that is gaming. Early app games, such as Doodle Jump, Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds brought casual gaming to the masses.
While games console owners belonged to a self-selecting and limited demographic, everyone and their grandparents could suddenly access games of varying complexity by way of the essential consumer tech product that the smartphone quickly became.
Smartphone ownership in 2023 is thought to be at around 86.4% of the world’s population, making them the most commonplace and popular video game platform on earth by a huge margin.
Over time, smartphone gaming apps diversified, with popular freemium games continuing to appeal to a general player-base of casual gamers, while increasingly sophisticated titles such as Call of Duty Mobile and Genshin Impact have made the case for the platform being a decent contender for its console counterparts.
The Grass May Be Greener
All told, on the App store there are over a million games available, many of which are free. With such a huge wealth of options, you may reasonably wonder why anybody would ever need to look elsewhere for their mobile gaming fix, but there are several compelling reasons why they may do this.
All games, and all apps, that appear in the official app stores of iOS and Android are vetted for compliance with the operating systems’ terms of service, and while this typically ensures quality control, it can limit the scope of titles that for one reason or another do not neatly fit within these parameters.
Below we’re going to take a look at two key examples of where seeking out alternatives to the standard app store fare can open up new gameplay possibilities for players to explore.
Browser-based Gameplay Options
Long before the arrival of apps, if people wanted to play games online they would simply fire up their web browser and set sail on the open internet seeking titles to play.
Many popular websites from this largely forgotten heyday are still going strong, having successfully weathered the disruptive transition from Macromedia Flash to HTML5 codecs.
The leading example of these is Newgrounds, which was founded in 1995 and became the internet’s top directory of creative indie games. Here you may find truly surprising titles that would never find their way onto the official app stores.
Elsewhere, certain gaming categories – such as titles belonging to the broad umbrella of the iGaming industry – are historically underrepresented on the app stores. Leading mobile casinos, such as those collated by VegasSlotsOnline, give you on-demand access to top quality digital variants of some of the most popular table and casino games in the world.
What’s more, many of these can be enjoyed for free, or at the behest of significant discounts by way of competitive sign-up bonuses and welcome offers for new and returning gamers.
F.O.S.S. Games
Games belonging to the free and open-source software category are titles that have their source code readily available for inspection by any user.
This means that there’s no possibility of such a game installing to your device alongside malicious malware or suspicious permissions you wouldn’t otherwise know about.
For the privacy conscious, alternative app stores like Android’s F-Droid are highly prized as there you have access to a huge range of community supported games that are all available for free, and come with the peace of mind of knowing exactly what you’re installing.