A Guide To Mobile Bingo

Most UK bingo sites now offer some kind of mobile bingo but this is not always fully featured.  Our mobile bingo listings include top mobile bingo sites with Apple and/or Android apps for easy access, but there are other ways to play bingo on the go.

Before the advent of mobile bingo, if you wanted to play online bingo and see how the game panned out you’d be tied to your desk.  Not any more!  Play on a tablet or smartphone and you can play mobile bingo anywhere around the house or garden, as well as on the move.  You could even play with a group of friends if they all have their tablets with them – how’s that for a 21st century idea?

Mobile Bingo – How It Works

Mobile Bingo and Adobe Flash

When bingo first went online, the vast majority of bingo and slots programs were written using Adobe Flash and as recently several still were.  Apple have never supported Flash and while very early versions of Android did, versions onwards stopped doing so.  Flash was far too vulnerable to exploits to be suitable for use on mobile devices where secure information is regularly transmitted across the internet.

This presented a big problem for people wanting to play bingo on their mobiles as the bingo lobby wouldn’t work on Apple phones at all and would only work on (some) Android phones if you overrode the security settings.  Not only that, but the combination of Flash and a touchscreen rarely worked well.

Early Mobile Bingo Products

You would think that operators would swiftly move to fill that gap in the market, wouldn’t you?  Maybe they would have done, if they’d understood that the gap existed.  We can laugh about this now, but in the early 2010s, there were many in the industry who thought that mobile bingo would never become a thing because the screens were too small and the connections too slow.  The result of the demand for mobile bingo not being taken seriously enough was that many bingo sites had either

1. No mobile service at all or
2. Some kind of drastically cut down mobile service.   We’re talking no chat, only one bingo room, or even slots only.  Perhaps the most annoying of the cut down bingo products was the pre-2018 Jumpman mobile platform; it let you buy bingo tickets but you couldn’t get into the bingo room to see the game play out!

Only a few bingo products were ahead of the curve, in one (or more) of the following ways.

Responsive Mobile Bingo

Almost every website you visit is responsive.  In fact, you’ve probably forgotten what a non responsive site looks like!  Responsive sites detect your device type, screen size and resolution and rearrange the page or load a slightly different version to suit; if you try to view a non responsive site on a small screen you’ll find parts of it are offscreen.

By far the most common way to deliver a bingo product across all devices these days is via a responsive website written in HTML5.

With this arrangement, when you visit the bingo site from the browser on your phone or tablet, the site auto-detects that and loads a version of the site that is optimised for your screen size. There’s no need to download anything.  The responsive bingo sites of today load a mobile version that usually includes everything you’d get on a computer screen but with some creative solutions such as pop-ups and navigation icons to keep the much smaller phone screen uncluttered.  Early responsive bingo sites were a bit more hit and miss though.

If the desktop version of the bingo site was still Flash (and most were including all Dragonfish bingo sites prior and all Virtue Fusion bingo sites prior) the mobile version that was loaded would be completely different; these early HTML5 mobile bingo clients were often very poor relations of the Flash lobby providing a far from satisfactory user experience for mobile players.

Mobile Bingo Apps

The advantages of playing via a mobile bingo app on a phone or tablet instead of using the device’s built in browser are those of convenience and security – as there is no need to type in a site address there is no danger of falling foul of typosquatting, and as the browser is bypassed there is no danger of accidentally saving the password in the browser settings thus inadvertently allowing children who use the same devices (or the same browser ID on a different device) to access a gambling account.

How To Install Mobile Bingo Apps

The safest way to do this for an Apple or Android app is to go to the bingo site from your phone’s browser and look for a button there rather than by going to the App Store or Google Play independently.  Some bingo sites will even detect your phone’s operating system and place a notification at the top of the screen inviting you to download their app whereas others have App Store and Google Play buttons.

• When you follow an App Store link from the site you know the app is still current and therefore properly supported
• There have been many cases of fake apps in the App Store including fake shopping apps and fake Minecraft games so it is important to make sure that you get the genuine article.

Another installation path for mobile bingo apps is via a link or passcode sent by text message to the player’s mobile phone and this is the method generally used by phone only casinos. It is super easy to use and has good security.

A further type of bingo app you may come across is a Progressive Web App or PWA.  This is not really an app at all; all it does is install a shortcut to the bingo site’s home page on your phone screen and cache it on your phone for faster loading.  You still have to remember passwords etc and it doesn’t have the security advantages of a true app, only the convenience.