For most of the last decade, casual gaming meant the app store. You wanted to play 2048, you downloaded the 2048 app. You wanted Sudoku, you downloaded one of 50 Sudoku apps. The browser was for work — apps were for play. That was the deal.
It's quietly shifting back. For a specific category of game — short, simple, played in 5-minute sessions — the open web is winning. Not by being better in every way, but by being better in the ways that matter for that category.
What changed
Three things converged around 2023-2024:
Mobile browsers got fast. Modern Chrome and Safari on a mid-range Android phone can run HTML5 Canvas at 60fps without breaking a sweat. Web Audio works. Touch input has sub-30ms latency. The technical excuse for needing a native app — "the browser can't handle it" — stopped being true for most casual game formats.
App install friction got worse. Apple and Google added more permission prompts, more privacy disclosures, more "this app wants to track you" dialogs. None of these are bad ideas in isolation, but the cumulative effect is that downloading a free game now takes 6-8 taps and three confirmations. For a game you might play for 10 minutes total, that's an enormous activation cost.
App store search got worse. If you search "sudoku" in the iOS App Store in 2025, you get a wall of nearly-identical results, most of them packed with in-app purchases, daily reward systems, and 30-second video ads between every puzzle. Finding the version that's actually good takes more effort than just playing the game.
Where the web genuinely wins
For specific game types, the browser has structural advantages:
Try-then-leave is the natural mode
If someone says "have you played Wordle?" you can be playing within 5 seconds. Type the URL, the page loads, the game starts. No account creation. No app store. No 200MB download. When you're done, you close the tab. There's nothing to uninstall, nothing to clean up.
This is exactly the workflow people want for casual games. Play once, decide if it's interesting, leave or come back tomorrow. Mobile apps are optimized for the opposite — they want you to install, log in, build a streak, get pushed notifications. For 80% of games people actually want, that's overkill.
Sharing is trivial
A browser game has a URL. You can text it, post it, embed it, link it from a tweet. A native app has an App Store page, which is a URL, but tapping it opens the App Store, where the user then has to remember why they were there. Every step of friction loses about half the audience.
Wordle's viral takeoff in late 2021 happened almost entirely because of shareability. The game was browser-based, the URL was simple, and the shareable result (those colored squares) didn't require anyone to install anything. A native version would have been a fraction of the size.
No platform tax
Apple and Google take 30% of all in-app purchase revenue. For a developer building a casual game with $5 of microtransactions per user, that's a $1.50 platform tax on every transaction. On the web, you keep ~97% (minus payment processor fees). Most casual developers don't actually need this — they make money from ads, not IAPs — but for those who do sell anything, the math is brutal on mobile.
Where native apps still win
The web isn't winning everywhere. For specific cases, the app store remains the right answer:
Games requiring sustained engagement. If your game is meant to be played daily for months — Pokemon Go, Genshin Impact, anything with a serious progression system — the app store's installation friction is actually a feature, not a bug. You're trying to filter out casual players. Friction is signal.
Games using device hardware deeply. AR games, fitness games using gyroscope/accelerometer in nontrivial ways, anything needing background services or push notifications — these benefit from native API access that the web doesn't expose. The mobile web's permissions model is intentionally weaker.
Games that need to feel premium. Paying $7.99 for a one-time game on the App Store feels different from paying it on a website. The browser still has a "throwaway" connotation for some users. This is partly perception, partly real (browsers truly do throw away local data more often).
The 2025 reality
If you're building a casual game today and asking "should this be a website or a mobile app," here's the honest framework:
If the game is short (under 10 minutes per session) and skill-based: build it for the web. The shareability and zero-friction install will beat any app store strategy. Sites like Wordle, the New York Times Mini Crossword, and (we hope) GerGame demonstrate this works.
If the game depends on a progression system or daily habit loops: build it for mobile. The retention mechanics of native apps (notifications, home screen icons, biometric authentication for in-app purchases) make the difference between a game people play once and a game that becomes a habit.
If you're not sure: start with the web. It's cheaper to build, faster to iterate, and you can always wrap it as a hybrid app later (using Capacitor or PWA install) once you understand what users actually want.
What this means for us
GerGame is deliberately a web-first portal. We never plan to ship a native app. The games are designed for 3-10 minute sessions, played opportunistically — on a phone in line at the coffee shop, on a laptop while waiting for a build to finish, on a tablet before bed. That use case favors the web.
We're betting that the next decade of casual gaming will be a partial return to web-first, not because the technology changed dramatically but because the friction of native apps caught up with what users were willing to tolerate. The numbers will tell us whether that bet was right.