The popularity of iPad’s and tablet devices in general is increasing at a rapid rate but unfortunately it would appear that online poker sites don’t appear to be part of the iPad revolution. Whether there is a belief that tablets are just a fad, popularity will die out and people will go back to their desktops and laptops or there is a genuine lack of understanding about the power of mobile marketing today I don’t know. Whatever their reasons, poker rooms on the whole are not making enough of an effort to allow players to play poker from a mobile device like an iPad or Samsung Galaxy tablet.

What poker apps are out there?

So you want to play poker on your iPad? If you go into the iTunes App store you will see several tens of different apps that will allow you to play poker, but the vast majority of these are simply play money games designed to pass a few minutes. There are very few dedicated poker room apps that you can install and play for real money.

There are two large poker rooms that have embraced mobile apps and these are –

PokerStars – See more information
888 – See more information

Both are established brands and their apps have great functionality that allows you to have the facilities of your desktop client on your iPad.

A smaller brand which has a more dedicated approach solely to mobile is Switch Poker – See more information.

Few if any of the other major online poker sites have chosen to introduce a dedicated mobile app for their customers which I find perplexing to say the least. What reasons could they have?

Why aren’t there more mobile poker apps?

Technically speaking there are loads of poker apps that you can download for the iPad. It is the apps where you play for real money that are lacking in the market.

You could argue that app development is an expensive business and poker rooms don’t want to go to the expense. I don’t buy this argument. Given the profits in online poker I don’t believe for a second that there aren’t the finances in place to develop an app.

Perhaps the thought is that people that are going to use the apps are already customers and so the return on investment for the app being developed is not high. This is a possibility, but I would argue that given the extremely small number of mobile poker apps that are available that allow you to play for money, I would say that the poker rooms that head down the app development route will get early adoption boosts because people who want to play poker on their iPad currently have so few options that they will be forced to use what is on the market.

There are undoubtedly issues surrounding the fact that the iPad can’t play Flash, so this has been a barrier towards a lot of online poker being played through a browser, but with a native iPad app this wouldn’t be an issue.

Finally, there might be the perception that there is no need for creating poker apps because the players don’t want them. I simply don’t believe this to be the case. The use is mobile devices is outstripping the demand for virtually every other entertainment device globally, so the logical extension to that is if people are given the opportunity to use their mobile device to play poker, they will. They just need the app to use in the first place!

The future for mobile poker apps

I think in the next year or two most if not all of the major poker rooms will have their own Apple and/or Android powered apps. I’d like to think that the days when eager players that want to play poker on their iPad have had to use a VNC to remote desktop into their laptop of home computer to access the poker software from there have gone. Why make it more difficult for poker players to play? Give us all mobile poker apps and we’ll play on our mobile devices. Simple.