New mobile casinos and gambling applications are springing up each week due to the steady growth of the mobile market and mobile casino industry subsector in particular. Will this trend continue and what factors does it depend on?

The first and foremost aspect of every business is demand. The demand for mobile casino applications and websites is really huge. No matter how much some gamblers enjoy the atmosphere of land-based casinos, most of them are just too busy to be able to go out as often as they want. Needless to say that as long as mobile devices are always at one's fingertips, people begin to embrace the idea of mobile gambling. Probably the new generations of casino players will not even consider playing any other way.

Mobile casino operators and app developers are in their turn really interested in satisfying the customers' growing demand. More and more apps are offered for free, which is important because even if the app costs around $1 there are still those who would rather not play than pay. In fact, it is even unnecessary to download anything, because many online casinos offer fully functional mobile versions of their sites.

The emergence of new mobile devices is another factor fuelling the growth of mobile casino industry. App developers take full advantage of the new technology, so the more sophisticated mobile gadgets become, the more advanced mobile casino applications we will be able to download. Today we're taking advantage of the touch screen technology, who knows what else we will enjoy in a year or two after a launch of new devices.

Another influencing factor is regulation of mobile gambling. It is obvious that every single country is interested in supporting this industry as long as it brings in a lot of money. The main problem now is that governments of many countries are not quite sure about how exactly to control this relatively new industry. Unfortunately, it is gamblers who suffer from the government's short-sighted actions in the first place and it will remain so until some decent law will come.

Earlier this year, Apple greenlighted real-money gambling apps into their App Store for the first time. Although their policy tends to be changeable, there's still hope that they will not ban applications that are favoured by millions of gamblers.

GBGC has recently published a report on mobile gambling. According to their calculations, the global m-Gambling market was worth $2.7 billion in gross gaming yield (GGY) in 2010. They expect the market to reach $4.8 billion by 2013, which will account for 11% of the total Interactive gambling market.