Mobile now generates 58% of Europe's online gambling revenue and is heading toward about two-thirds by 2029, driven by in-play betting, second-screen habits and mobile-native payments. The side effect is a tracking problem few operators have solved: app installs and mobile-web visits use two different attribution systems, and unless they are reconciled to one player record, conversions get lost or paid twice. This article lays out the data behind the shift and what operators and affiliates need to fix.
Europe's gambling market reached €123.4 billion in gross gaming revenue in 2024, up 5% year on year. But the market-size headline isn't the story this year - the device driving it is. Mobile has stopped being the convenient alternative to desktop and become the default way Europeans gamble, and the five-year trajectory below makes that shift easier to see than any single-year figure.
Mobile share of online gambling revenue, 2019-2029
| Market | 2019 | 2023 | 2024 | 2029 (projected) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Europe (online GGR) | 45% | 56% | 58% | ~67% |
Why Mobile Overtook Desktop
The pull toward mobile isn't just habit - it's structural. In 2026, 54% of all sports wagers are placed in-play, a live-betting format that suits a phone in someone's hand far better than a desktop browser tab. Odds move fast during a live event, and the seconds saved placing a bet on mobile versus the 30-45 seconds it typically takes on desktop can be the difference between getting a price and missing it.
Second-screen behaviour reinforces the same pattern. Over half of sports viewers use a second screen while watching a live broadcast, rising to 80-87% among Gen Z viewers, and smartphones are consistently the preferred second-screen device. With average daily smartphone use sitting around 4.5 hours and smartphones accounting for over 96% of daily internet access, the phone is simply where attention already lives - gambling apps are built to meet it there with push notifications timed to live odds and personalised alerts.
Have Payments Moved to Mobile Too?
The payment mix backs up the device shift. Around 60% of bettors who place seven or more bets a week use e-wallets such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, or PayPal - all of which are mobile-native and, in several cases, simply unavailable on desktop unless a user owns specific hardware. Crypto wallets follow the same logic: most are designed for smartphones first, giving bettors a single app for storing, transferring, and depositing funds. Card payments, meanwhile, have declined further in markets like Great Britain, where credit card gambling is prohibited outright.
Why Is App vs. Mobile Web Attribution So Hard to Measure?
Here's the structural problem mobile dominance creates for anyone running an affiliate program: no regulator, operator, or measurement vendor publishes a breakdown of app versus mobile-web revenue - and that gap isn't a data delay, it's a tracking architecture problem.
Two separate attribution systems now have to agree on the same player:
| Mobile web | Native app | |
|---|---|---|
| Identifier | Affiliate click ID | Install referrer / platform attribution token |
| Confirmed by | Server-to-server postback | Mobile measurement partner (MMP) |
| Risk if unreconciled | Conversion lost | Conversion double-counted |
A player who clicks an affiliate link on mobile web, installs the native app minutes later, then deposits inside it, crosses both systems in a single journey. Without reconciliation to one player record, that conversion falls into one of the two risk rows above - either it disappears, or it gets paid out twice.
Add in the app-store rules governing real-money gambling apps - licensing per territory, enforced geo-restriction, mandatory free downloads with no platform billing on wagers - and it's clear why operators typically launch on mobile web first in a new market and layer in the native app once store approval clears. For affiliates, that means the same campaign can require two different tracking destinations in two different phases of a single market launch.
What This Means for Operators and Affiliates?
Reconciling these two attribution models to one player record is now a core requirement, not a nice-to-have. In practice, that means:
- Deferred deep linking that carries the affiliate's click ID through the app-store handoff
- Deduplication at the player record, rather than at the individual conversion event
- Fraud controls configured separately per channel, since install farms and SDK spoofing don't look like cookie-based fraud
- Geo-aware commission rules at the link level, so a click never routes into a market where the app isn't even licensed to appear
Test this before you go live, as covered in our launch checklist. Streamer traffic makes the problem sharper, because creators' audiences move between phones and desktops constantly.
This is precisely the kind of infrastructure gap that turns a promising affiliate channel into a margin leak if it's left unaddressed - and precisely the layer a modern affiliate platform needs to close natively rather than patch with spreadsheets. That is the gap iGsuite is built to close: tracking, risk and payouts working from one player record. Comparing platforms? Our operator's buyer's guide covers what defensible tracking looks like.
Mobile didn't just change where players place a bet - it changed how many separate systems have to agree on who that player is and which partner sent them. The operators and affiliates who treat that reconciliation as core infrastructure, rather than an edge case to patch later, are the ones who'll capture the full value of a market that's still climbing toward 67% mobile share. The ones who don't will keep losing margin to conversions that vanish, or partners disputing commissions that were paid out twice.
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