Betting is a popular entertainment sport with its footprints being found from 17th Century. With the emergence of technology, the traditional betting industry has found a new virtual platform to bet through sports betting app development.
In recent years, the sports betting industry has gained immense traction globally. According to research, the global sports betting industry is estimated at around USD 83.65 billion. The study also forecasts that the industry will grow at a CAGR of 10.4% by 2030.
Although the market is blooming, it’s filled with fierce competition. From strict betting regulations to getting your betting app approved in the app market, creating a sports betting app is not easy to crack.
If you are eager to enter the betting industry, we understand that you must be teeming with questions. This blog will address all the underlying questions regarding the betting app development benefits, process, cost, technology, etc.
Therefore, delve deep into this blog to get every answer to your question related to betting app development.
Benefits of Sports Betting App Development
In the traditional setup, you need to stand up in a long queue and wait for your number to bet, but now, in this technology-driven phase. It is making it more feasible to bring betting to your fingertips through mobile apps.
Apart from this developing a sports betting app has a plethora of benefits. Let’s have a look at the other benefits of betting app development:
Convenience
Smartphones have made sports betting platforms access on the palms. The accessibility on the go has revolutionized the whole betting experience for the end-users. Players can place their bets anywhere without geographical constraints through worldwide technology connectivity.
Better User Experience
Sports betting app developers and designers spend a considerable time to perfect the UI/UX experience of the end users. In order to provide users with the ultimate gaming experience, numerous sports betting platforms have transitioned to mobile online betting apps.
Responsiveness and better UX through mobile apps has encouraged people to leverage more on fantasy sports website and app development. The developers design these apps to ensure compatibility with a wide range of devices. This leads to effortless access to user’s preferred sports betting platforms.
Access to Diverse Games
Smartphone packs a powerful CPU with ever improving screen resolutions and responsiveness. The ultimate gaming experience offered by smartphones has led to a variety of slots for eSports, casinos, card betting games and many more. Now, end-users can choose a betting game according to their personal preferences.
Unlimited Access
It is a perfect plan to execute and gain robust profit if you are willing to create a betting app. Mobile access to sports betting apps gives convenience to end-users to bet from anywhere, anytime, from any location. Hence, users don’t need to make out a particular time or go to a specific place to bet, as end-user can do it 24/7 without any geographical constraints.
More Privacy
Plenty of people are willing to explore the betting app market. But privacy concerns prevent them from visiting physical betting clubs and exploring prominent options. Besides, mobile gambling apps also allow one to research the betting market and the types of bets. Sports can bet on and more while the end-users can protect their privacy.
Better Accuracy With Free Play Practice
Multiple mobile betting apps offer practice to polish their betting skills by offering free and low-cost games. It mainly enables the players to try out new games, bet types, betting markets, and more without any financial statement.
Extra Mobile Bonus
Mobile sports betting has been around for quite some time, and multiple professional gamblers have taken full advantage of the ease that software for sports betting can provide. Most of such apps offer subscription bonuses for downloads and mobile sports betting, making engaging in betting activities a rewarding user experience.
Not only does that make it lucrative for the users to download the app. But that also helps the users give the fantastic betting experience.
How to Create a Sports Betting App: Step-by-Step Guide
Multiple parameters come into play while developing an intuitive sports betting app. From having a structured development team to publishing on the app store, the end-to-end process can feel a bit cumbersome. Here’s a step by step guide to create a betting app.
Step-1: Nurture Your Idea
The first step towards creating any app starts with conceptualization of your app. Having a clear vision is crucial as it will be the foundation for your future app. A clear vision helps in seamless concept delivery to your development team.
If your vision is already clear, you can skip this step and continue with the next step. In case you are still nurturing your “baby idea”, you can refer to sports betting apps already available on app stores for inspiration.
Step-2: Analyze Your Competitors
After idea generation, your next step should be to analyze your competitors, probably the top players making the sports betting app development a lucrative market to explore. Mainly, exploring your competitors will help in better analysis of the market and also find out the loopholes on which you can work and provide your end-users.
That can help your sports betting app stand out in the market and soar to high ends of success. Thoroughly accessing key business metrics of your competitor can give you insightful insights into their tactics, strengths, and weaknesses.
Step-3: Obtain Required Licenses
Unlike any other app, a sports betting app must comply with legal regulations and apply for a license in order to operate. The compliance rules vary according to the jurisdiction of a particular country or state. For example –
As you witnessed, the betting laws of different countries vary indefinitely. It’s best to hand off the process to a qualified lawyer.
Step-4: Select Technology Partner
The success of an app is not only dependent on the development team. There are plenty of factors that need to be considered like – business outlook, marketing, risk management, security and so on. Having a structured application development team is the key here.
That being said, oftentimes it’s not feasible to have such a vivid inhouse team. It is advised to seek the help of professionals providing sports app development services.
Step-5: Prioritize UI/UX Designing
Poor user experience is one of the prime contributors towards app failure. To avoid making this blunder, have a word with your technological partner regarding the betting app UI/UX designing. If feasible, consider having a graphical design mockup to have a better look and feel of the UI.
Keep in mind that humans are visual creatures. Making a simple user interface is likely to keep your users engaged. However, you can incorporate small animations for window transitions for more immersive experience.
Step-6: Decide Your Backend Infrastructure
Once the betting app design aspect is perfected, it’s time to work on the backend infrastructure for your upcoming betting application.
Since it deals with all data-driven processes, backend development is the most crucial element in your entire application. Having a robust and scalable backend infrastructure is considered ideal for handling high user traffic, adding new functionality and modifying existing functionality.
It is recommended to use microservices infrastructure to achieve a full-scale scalable solution. Using microservices, subdivides your software into a small cluster of autonomous services. The non interconnected services make it feasible to build the application simultaneously. This drastically enhances productivity while reducing the app development time.
Step-7: Consider Building an MVP Application
The end-to-end sports betting app development process can be time consuming. It’s better to make your mark in the industry by developing an MVP version of the application. MVP (Minimum Viable Product) offer users with minimum yet core functionality of a sports betting app.
Building an MVP version allows you to get early feedback from your end users. Analyzing the feedback will help you in understanding the pain points of your end users. You can then transform the insights by upgrading your solution to address those pain points.
Here’s a list of standard features that should be included in the MVP version of your application.
Login and registration: Login page is considered the pivot point of your application success. This is the first page the user encounters when they use your application. Your login page should cover basic functionality like username, password, forget password and log out features.
Create a wager: Wagering is an integral part of sports betting. Design your MVP application to allow users to wager on events of their liking. It’s also good to integrate search functionality to navigate through events.
List of wagers: Usually betters sort their wagers according to various filters. Betting app developers can seize this opportunity to deliver personalized recommendations based on the user’s previous activity.
Betting waitlist: Majority of apps dealing with payments incorporate wallet solutions. It’s safe to go with the trend and offer a betting wallet feature. Offering a wallet allows users to use credit cards to top-up their account.
Menu bar: Consider providing an easy to navigate menu bar for accessing all the preliminary features of MVP application. Consider providing users a way to contact the managers to report potential bugs.
Push notification: With dozens of apps in your smartphone, it’s easy to get lost in the limbo. Having a push notification serves as customer engagement. You can keep your clients informed about the upcoming events and offers.
Step-8: Integrate Payment Solution
Payment gateway integration is one of the fundamental elements for sports betting app development. Considering the importance of payment solutions, developers should implement multiple payment methods for fast and comfortable in-app purchases.
There is a significant friction from payment providers to associate with the betting industry. This is due to various compliance rules and regulations associated with betting apps.
However, there are many payment system providers willing to cooperate with online betting platforms.
Stripe – Fairly easy to integrate, Stripe offers fast and secure payment payments. Check out Stripe’s regulations about using it for betting platforms.
Neteller – Trusted by millions of users, Neteller offers high-level security for payment services.
Skrill – Available in over 200 countries, Skrill offers a wide range of payment methods at affordable prices.
Step-9: Comply to Data Security
Betting industry is considered to be one of the most sensitive industries. As you will be working with data driven backend infrastructure, security should be at the prime of your focus.
There are multiple effective approaches to implementing a strong set of security measures:
Employing data encryption: This technique involves transforming readable data into an unreadable code, making it inaccessible to unauthorized individuals.
Implementing two-factor authentication (2FA): This authentication method requires users to provide two or more forms of identification, such as a phone number, email, or login credentials.
Utilizing a secure payment gateway: Given that financial transactions are integral to the service, protecting sensitive transaction data through encryption is vital.
Step-10: Publish on App Store
Sports betting app development requires a strategic premarketing approach to ensure success. During this stage, it is essential to engage in the following activities:
Develop a pre-launch marketing campaign: Utilize email marketing as an effective method to provide users with enticing teasers of the app. Notify your potential users about the app’s launch date to encourage immediate reviews and testing.
Create an intuitive landing page: Design a landing page to highlight key details about your betting app. This page can also serve as a platform for your target audience to sign up for the pre-launch marketing campaign.
Prepare a compelling media kit: Construct a media kit including essential information like logos and videos. The media kit will serve as pre-launch brand awareness of your application. The primary objective of the pre-launch media kit is to enhance visibility and anticipation for your brand.
Step-11: Conduct Post-launch Activities
To complement your pre-marketing efforts, consider conducting post-launch activities. Here’s what you can do:
Leverage Modern Technologies: AI, Machine Learning and Blockchain
Modern apps are associated with AI in some form or another. With the massive popularity of AI-based apps like ChatGPT and MidJourney, it’s evident that AI is going to be the future. Why not leverage these technologies for our betting application?
Consider the below approaches to infuse AI, machine learning and blockchain in your sports betting application.
Machine learning: Incorporate machine learning for analyzing historical data to generate accurate predictions. Machine learning can also be used to personalize user experiences. Leveraging machine learning you an suggest betting strategies, and detect suspicious activities.
Artificial intelligence: By using AI techniques like NLP, analyze sports news, articles, and social media data. The analysis can provide insightful data like emerging trends for making informed decisions. Having an in app AI-powered chatbot can also enhance customer support and engagement
Blockchain: Integrate blockchain technology to enhance transparency, security, and fairness in sports betting. Blockchain can also facilitate secure storage and verification of historical betting data. From a security perspective, this prevents tampering and provides an auditable trail.
Tech Stack Recommendation for Building Sports Betting App
Depending on the functionality requirement and unique needs, an application’s tech stack is bound to change. Let’s have a brief overview of all the underlying technologies and frameworks that come into play for sports betting app development.
Programming Languages
The fundamental of any new app development is picking the programming language based on which the whole application is going to be designed. For example – For developing an android application, you must decide between Java or Kotlin. If you are planning to develop a cross-platform application, Flutter or React Native will be the right choice. Swift is the language picked for iOS based applications.
In no particular order, here’s the list of programming languages that could be leveraged for sports betting app development
JavaScript – It is one of the most mature frameworks with active community support. JavaScript has seen multiple version upgrades with the passage of time. There are numerous libraries and frameworks derived from JavaScript like – ReactJS, Angular 2.0, VueJS. If you are looking to develop a web-based application, JavaScript becomes an obvious choice for such a scenario.
Kotlin – Originated at JetBeans, Kotlin is an open source statically typed programming language. It was designed for Java Virtual Machine and Android. Focussed on interoperability, Kotlin combines both OOPS concepts and programming features.
Swift – Swift is an intuitive programming language developed by Apple. Its easier to read and maintain. Swift also features writing concurrent code with simple built in keywords.
React Native – It is one of the ultimate cross-platform solutions for building mobile apps. With its powerful components and JavaScript syntax, you can create stunning, performant applications for iOS and Android effortlessly.
Flutter – Flutter is an open source mobile UI framework developed by Google. It is used to build natively compiled, cross platform applications from a single codebase. Dart is the programming language that is used to create applications in Flutter.
Database
We know that mobile betting apps are data driven applications. Whenever there is data present, the database is bound to exist. A database is a secure hub for exchange and storage of data. Following are the list of popular database systems –
MongoDB – A popular noSQL database offering scalability and flexibility with querying and indexing. The database provides support for JSON-like storage.
Redis – Remote Dictionary Server aka Redis is another open source noSQL database. It is an in-memory based database used for quick storage of information or applications cache.
PostgreSQL – It is a 27-year old mature open source database. Unlike MongoDB and Redis, PostgreSQL is a relational database system that supports both JSON and SQL querying.
Cassandra – It is an open source noSQL distributed database. Cassandra is mainly used for storing large amounts of data without compromising performance.
HBase – Just like Cassandra, Apache HBase is another open source noSQL distributed database. The database runs on top of the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). Choose Apache HBase when you require instantaneous and unrestricted read and write access to your extensive Big Data.
Third Party APIs
Any successful modern-day application is incomplete without API development and integration. An API helps you access multiple features that are already available in the market. This drastically reduces your time to market. Whether it’s integration of chatbot, payment services or analytics, there exists an API for every major feature.
Donbest – Donbest offers a REST API that lets you access their price data and analytics.
Sinch – Experience Sinch’s transcription and voice recognition services designed specifically for online sports betting platforms.
Firebase – Leveraging Firebase REST API, you can access their storage and messaging features.
Twilio – With the Twilio REST API, you gain the ability to retrieve essential information regarding your account, phone numbers, calls, text messages, and recordings. Twilio also allows you to conduct advanced actions such as initiating outbound calls and dispatching text messages.
Real-time Analytics
Sports betting platforms are fast paced betting platforms. To keep a track of all the ongoing events happening in your business, it’s best to rely on some real-time analytics platform.
IBM – IBM offers cutting-edge software solutions designed to empower businesses with real-time visibility into their operations. Through advanced programs such as Spark and Cisco Hadoop, IBM enables you to effortlessly monitor and stay updated on the dynamic happenings within your organization.
Apache – Apache offers a robust web server capable of effectively managing and analyzing vast quantities of data.
Flink – Apache Flink is a fully managed Amazon service. It empowers instantaneous data analytics on streaming data. Flink is perfectly suited for seamless Extract-transform-load (ETL) pipelines involving continuous streaming data.
Cost of Building a Sports Betting App
Roughly, the cost to create a betting app platform can be around $20,000 to $80,000 and above on the additional functionality.
Note: The above mentioned cost is a rough estimation. It can go low or high based on your unique requirements.
Though, the cost to create a betting app is highly subjective. There are multiple factors to take into consideration before coming up with an estimated figure. Few of the factors are:-
Apart from this, functionality is one of the crucial factors in deciding the cost factor. If you are looking for guidance to create your betting platform, you should consult with a sports betting software development company. They can provide you with an in-depth cost analysis.
Note: The above mentioned cost is a rough estimation. It can go low or high based on your unique requirements.
Conclusion
Creating a betting app has its fair share of trouble. From idea conceptualization to post launch marketing activities, we have listed down all the steps involved while creating a sports betting app.
Still confused on where to get started with? Worry not – we got your covered! Contact us for a free consultation regarding your sports betting app idea. Equipped with similar experience, our sports betting app developers will come in handy for transforming your ideas to reality.
FAQs
Simply create an account, provide your personal details, make a deposit, and establish your bankroll. From there, conveniently place your bets directly within the app. Stay up-to-date with the results and effortlessly withdraw your winnings using the app of your choosing.
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