How We Rate Casino Apps
Our job at Casino Apps is to rate and review online casinos that can be accessed and enjoyed by players here in the USA. The aim is to highlight the apps or mobile-friendly sites that are both entertaining and trustworthy so that you can have fun without compromising your safety and security.
But how exactly do we come up with our ratings? That’s the question we’ll be answering on this page. Over the next few minutes, we’ll explain exactly what our expert reviewers look for when assessing a casino gaming venue for mobile players. You don’t need to know any of this to make use of our ratings, but understanding how we test and rate casino apps should give you a greater degree of confidence in what we have to say about them.
Casino App Rating Criteria
There are many aspects of casino apps that need to be considered before any review can be considered complete. While some review sites like to focus squarely on the games that can be played or the bonuses that you can get by using a particular app, we prefer to take a broader approach and also look at other important things like payment methods and customer support. Here’s a quick breakdown of the key aspects that our reviewers put under the microscope.
Game Selection
The whole point of visiting any casino, whether it’s by going to Las Vegas or logging in on your smartphone, is to play games. For that reason, one of the first things that our reviewers look at is the range of games on offer. Casino apps vary quite a bit in terms of the number of games available, the types of games that can be played, and the quality of those games.
It’s no good a casino having thousands of titles if they’re all obscure slots that nobody wants to play. Similarly, a casino with just a handful of games – no matter how superb they may be – could get boring pretty fast. We give higher ratings to casino apps that have a nice balance and offer a good number of top-quality games in a variety of genres. Give us a few hundred games that include slots, table games, and live dealer games that we actually want to play, and we’ll be happy.
Bonuses and Promotions
Online casino gaming is a competitive business, and players have thousands of venues to choose from. That means it’s a buyer’s market as far as potential customers are concerned, and casinos need to go out of their way to get their fair share of attention. One of the main ways they do that is by offering bonuses to attract new players and running various promotions to keep existing players engaged.
As with games, our reviewers look at both the quality and size of available bonuses. Some casino bonuses look fantastic on the front page, but when you look at their terms and conditions, they aren’t very good at all. We’re all for being offered a big bonus for signing up and making a first deposit with a casino, but only if their wagering requirements are also reasonable.
In order for a casino app to get a good rating from us, it needs to offer a decent bonus for new players and something useful for existing players, too. Examples of the latter could be useful reload bonuses, cashback offers, or a loyalty program of some kind – all with fair terms.
Safety & Security
Playing games at online casinos for real money involves risk, so you need to be confident that the casino app you choose to use is safe and secure. Online gaming can be just as safe as spending real money at your favorite online store, but only when the site has put adequate measures in place to keep your transactions as private and secure as they possibly can be. Our reviewers look into all of that on your behalf and would never recommend a site that they wouldn’t be happy to play at themselves.
Our audit of safety and security measures includes ensuring that the venue is properly licensed by a trusted regulator, encrypts financial transitions, and stores any retained data behind strong firewalls.
Payment Methods
Before you can play online casino games for real money, you’ll need to give the casino some of your cash to start with. That’s why another thing that our reviewers look at carefully is the range of methods that can be used to make deposits and withdrawals. We don’t need a casino to accept every payment method that’s out there, but we do want venues to be able to accommodate the needs of most players.
In addition to the types of payment methods available, our review rating also reflects any transaction fees casinos charge. Ideally, a casino wouldn’t charge any fees for deposits or withdrawals, but if it does, those fees need to be fair and transparent.
A third factor that our reviewers look at regarding payment methods is the speed of withdrawal. Casinos are always as fast as they can be to take our cash, and we prefer that they don’t hang around when we come to withdraw any winnings we’ve been lucky enough to make. The swifter and smoother the withdrawal process is, the better.
Customer Support
The fifth main feature that our reviewers evaluate when rating a casino is the available customer support. Problems aren’t common at the best online casinos, but players can still encounter some difficulties from time to time. You might forget your password, for example, or have a question about a certain bonus offer, or find that an attempt to make a deposit hasn’t gone through quite as you expected. In all of these cases and others like them, being able to chat with a member of the casino support staff is a definite advantage.
To get a top rating in this area, a casino needs to provide customer support around the clock – that means 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Ideally, support should be available via Live Chat, with backup systems in place so that you can also send an email. Of course, the support itself also needs to be up to scratch. It’s not enough that a question gets answered, but that it’s answered as fully as you want in a way that’s friendly and genuinely supportive.
Our Evaluation Process
Now that you know what areas we focus on when rating casino apps, you might appreciate hearing about how we go about our evaluations. It’s actually quite straightforward because our reviewers do exactly what you would do as a player. They explore the site, sign up for an account, make a deposit, play the available games, and so on. Of course, they are also careful to look a lot closer than a typical player would. That means they actually read the small print of the bonus terms and conditions, check the site’s licensing credentials, and even think of a question or two to put the customer support team through its paces.
Ratings are awarded for each of the areas we’ve outlined based on the professional knowledge and personal experience of our reviewers. Those separate ratings are then compiled, and an average is calculated from them to give us an overall rating for each casino. This enables us to rank casinos and highlight the best of them in a way that’s accessible for players.
Why Trust Our Casino App Reviews?
There is no shortage of sites that offer casino reviews and ratings, but in this age of companies buying reviews to order, not all of them can be trusted. So why trust us?
Well, we take pride in the fact that our reviewers are both genuine experts in the field and that they are people who actually enjoy playing online casino games themselves. At the same time, they have decades of broad journalistic experience, and they prize journalistic integrity above all else. If a casino is found to be so flawed that it doesn’t even merit a review, it doesn’t get one. That’s why all of the casino apps featured on this site are considered worth playing at. The ones that aren’t don’t even get a mention on our pages.
Another reason why you can trust our casino app reviews is because they aren’t set in stone. Our team regularly revisits casinos to ensure that the assigned ratings are still accurate and dependable. If a casino changes something, for better or worse, reviews and ratings are also edited to reflect those changes. In some cases, where multiple changes have been made, a brand new review is commissioned to be drawn up from scratch. This approach ensures that our reviews are as current and reliable as possible, and our top list of casinos is always shuffled to accurately reflect our latest ratings.
Conclusion
As you’ve seen, the ratings that we use to rank the casinos we highlight don’t simply fall out of the sky. On the contrary, they are arrived at thanks to our expert reviewers putting each venue under the microscope and assessing how they fare in multiple areas of importance. By sharing our approach in a clear and transparent way, it’s our hope that you will have full confidence in the ratings we provide and that you will use them to help you choose the most suitable casino apps for you.
