Going native: adhering to Apple’s app design guidelines

When Apple suddenly announced last summer that container, or wrapped, gaming and sportsbook apps needed to behave in a more native-like manner with all content running inside the apps, it’s fair to say it caused shockwaves throughout the sector. To compound matters, the Cupertino, California-based tech goliath gave the industry an impossibly tight three-month window in which to comply with the updated app design guidelines. However, probably due to an avalanche of protestations from up-in-arms operators and suppliers, Apple relented to a certain degree and extended the deadline until 3 March.

A six-month reprieve was certainly welcome, if slightly unexpected, yet it would still be an extremely challenging timeframe for redesigning and reengineering apps to pass Apple’s often hit-or-miss App Store approval process and adhere to the required native functionality. Indeed, Jade Daniels, design director at Manchester-based app and web design agency Degree 53, says the announcement definitely sparked “initial panic” in the industry as companies tried to figure out the best course of action. “Maybe that’s why Apple extended the deadline, because they were getting contact from game developers with the same stressful remarks,” she says.

Them’s the rules

The update to the guidelines, which enforces current design standards 4.2 and 4.7, states that apps should include features, content and UI that elevate it beyond a repackaged website. In essence, it should offer the best possible UX. “If your app is not particularly useful, unique or ‘app-like’, it does not belong in the App Store,” Apple states. The company didn’t explicitly say that iOS apps needed to be built entirely natively, but instead the emphasis is on them performing in an app-like way. Any perfunctory effort to comply, such as simply adding push notifications and biometric login, probably isn’t going to cut the mustard with Apple.

Rebuilding an existing mobile sportsbook from scratch completely natively, for instance, could take a year or more. Therefore, the nine-month window from when Apple first dropped the bombshell would probably be unachievable, even if a well-resourced company started straight away. With the clock ticking, operators and suppliers are reaching crunch time if they haven’t already had their reconfigured apps approved. Daniels says: “Some people might be working on the very bare minimum to save on costs and time, and other companies might be working on a brand spanking fully native app. An approach might be to meet in the middle to see what features you can present to Apple and if that gets a successful app submission.”

In addition, there’s the age-old problem that Apple’s app review isn’t the most transparent and clear-cut process at the best of times. In fact, it can still be the bane of app developers’ lives. “The app review process doesn’t seem consistent at all,” Daniels complains. “Every time an app is submitted, it is reviewed by a completely different person, and we don’t really know what level of expertise they have. Also, they might have loads of apps to review that day and they might just quickly skim an app, or they might be very nit-picky. So, the review process is very inconsistent and the feedback is generic, so that’s what’s causing the panic.”

Making a point

Australian operator PointsBet has made a splash in the US since launching its in-house-built product in New Jersey in 2018. And the operator recently rolled out a major revamp of its iOS app that it says is compliant with Apple’s guidelines, including being written in native iOS and React. “We were approved within an hour and the codebase is now future-proof,” Ron Shell, VP for customer insights, proudly told EGR North America recently. “Even if we change the app, we’re now doing everything that they want per the Apple guidelines.” On the industry having to react to Apple’s enforcement, Shell said: “It impacted everyone in the industry, especially a lot of the sportsbooks that had casinos integrated which weren’t meeting the Apple guidelines.”

While PointsBet has successfully complied with Apple’s requirements, many European operators have to wrestle with legacy tech infrastructures and are, moreover, reluctant to reconfigure containers, which have been cheaper, faster and easier to build and manage over the years than creating separate native iOS and Android apps. Indeed, it’s rare to find a European operator with a completely native sportsbook app. Plus, most have tabs that shunt the player out of the app to an external browser for products like live casino. This set-up is at odds with Apple’s requirement for game content to be embedded in the binary without directing users to an external site. That’s a no-no.

Licensed-app development studio mkodo, whose clients include Rank Group and Danske Spil, has been working with games suppliers to insert HTML5 game content natively into apps using what managing director Stuart Godfree calls “web-bundled architecture”. However, he says a major frustration has been that certain game suppliers have been slow to tackle the issue and make alterations to games to work with the web-bundled architecture. “Some of the major game vendors are very, very late to the party,” he explains. “If you’re writing for a newspaper, you can’t hand in your copy one minute before the vans pull out of the printing works and start delivering the newspapers.”

Furthermore, Godfree accuses game vendors of addressing the problem entirely from a “very selfish point of view” when it comes to implementation. “Way back when electricity first hit the UK, there was about 20 different types of plug sockets because each power company produced their own power socket. It’s a bit like that; every single game supplier has decided on a level of implementation without thinking how many apps run just one vendor’s game. The types of products we work on will have probably 15 or so game vendors’ products in them, so that has been one of our largest frustrations.”

The upshot of all this is that it’s created a great deal of duplication and complexity, not to mention app-bloat. With game manufacturers having to supply mkodo with SDKs, these each add 30MB or more to the size of an app. For example, the Mecca Bingo iOS app that mkodo is responsible for already tipped the scales at 110MB. Introducing these SDKs means the app starts to hit the cellular download limit of 200MB (previously 150MB) set by Apple. However, it’s worth noting iPhone and iPad users running iOS 13 are allowed to remove this limit and download large apps without WiFi. Nevertheless, some users will be put off installing such bulky apps. “It’s unnecessarily creating a large app and is something we would not normally encourage,” Godfree says.

Benchmarking sportsbook apps

To gauge how operators have been preparing their sportsbooks ahead of the deadline, Degree 53 recently undertook a comprehensive review using an iPhone X into 10 leading UK sports betting apps. Using Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines as a basis for the scoring, the team investigated various aspects of apps including onboarding, navigation, UI styling, loading states and refreshing, app format, and whether there was biometric authentication, dark mode and iPad view.

However, the results didn’t make for pretty reading, with most of the apps being containers that still need attention to improve native functionality. Ladbrokes scored the ‘highest’ at 55 out of 100, closely followed by bet365 and Unibet both with 54 out of 100, though Degree 53 said all 10 apps received “rather low ratings” and that “none of the operators stood out”.

Common reasons for low scores were web-like functionality and a lack of clear user journeys. “Navigation was the big thing that we marked down the container apps for,” Daniels tells EGR Technology. “It isn’t always about going above and beyond – I think what these bookmakers need to do is get the basics right.” Degree 53 recommends observing how Apple has designed its own OS and how it handles page titles, transitions and display content in an effort to implement more native designs and functionality. Of course, operators need to be mindful of regulations that require URLs and logos for RG services, which can make for busy, web-like pages that clash with Apple’s guidelines.

For sports betting operators who haven’t the time and resources to build a native app, it is about striking a balance between retaining the flexibility of HTML but having enough native elements to elevate the app beyond a repackaged website. One option could be to build a native front-end and it’s only when users drill down into betting markets that they encounter wrapped HTML5 web pages. “We’ve spoken to Apple about that and they said, fundamentally, they’re not against content, particularly that nature, being delivered by HTML5. But the application has to elevate itself beyond the website. Apple believe that bio login and push notifications is insufficient to make that difference. It ain’t going to cut it,” says Godfree.

Gambling on extra time

It is unclear whether Apple will pull apps that don’t meet its standards from 3 March. What seems apparent is if operators try to update apps with sideloaded HTML5 content after the deadline, Apple will reject them. If these apps are allowed to linger in the App Store, they will gradually ‘age’ and slip behind the competition as they can’t be iterated. With the deadline approaching, it’s a racing certainty sections of the industry will have lobbied Apple to grant a second extension. But this could have fallen on deaf ears. “I categorically do not believe that Apple will extend [the deadline],” Godfree asserts emphatically. “They do extend dates, but they don’t extend again,” he warns.

There is another way to look at the situation, though. This could end up being an opportunity for innovation. For more than a decade, mobile sportsbooks have looked like modified versions of the desktop product. And the desktop sportsbook was essentially a digital version of football coupons in betting shops in terms of the design and layout. Apple’s requirements could force companies to rethink the UX and native functionality of their apps, though there will be those companies fearful of deviating too far off-piste and alienating customers. “For me, it’s just really sad that it’s taken this to spark potentially new innovation,” Daniels says.

Mobile gambling is a commoditised space with precious few operators willing to break the mould and try new things with UI and UX, unlike the arms race of eight or so years ago. M&A and increased compliance partly stifled a willingness to take risks. The priority right now, though, is inserting enough native features and functionality to get multi-vertical apps waved through by the notoriously capricious tech giant. With the Cheltenham Festival, the climax of the domestic football season and the European Championships around the corner, remaining in Apple’s shop window for app discovery and, more importantly, distribution is the priority. Innovation can wait, at least for now.