Earlier this year, US betting giant DraftKings announced the debut of its unified “Super App”. The new mobile application update combines the operator sports betting, online casino, lottery and new prediction market into one digital platform. The core appeal is that players in any US state can download the app, even if not every part of it is legal in their jurisdiction and it will direct them to the parts that are.
This means a customer, for example, can download the app for sports betting in Illinois, and then if they travel to California they can use the same account and app for prediction market wagers or lottery. Then if they travel to Pennsylvania or New Jersey, the same applies to the online casino product. After years of developing siloed applications for each part of their business, FanDuel has also announced it will follow suit. So why now? And is this a new era of mobile gambling apps in the US?
Why Companies’ Priorities Have Shifted
Although revenue growth continues apace, sports betting expansion across the US has slowed somewhat after nearly a decade of new launches almost every other month. More than 35 states have opened legal sports betting markets in the US since 2018. But only one, Missouri, was added to the list in 2025.
This means an already competitive market is increasing in intensity. Customer acquisition remains expensive and marketing budgets are already high.
One way to ameliorate this issue is to focus on cross-selling customers across products. Changing to an all-in-one app strategy makes that process a lot easier. For example, a player that downloads the app specifically for NFL betting can be offered casino, lottery, prediction markets and Daily Fantasy Sports content – depending on their location at the time.
With many high limit customers, increasingly the main target market for many operators, living a jet setting life across the US – being able to log in to one unified app while travelling across the country is a key selling point.
Prediction Markets are a New Challenger
Another reason for this change is the widespread availability of prediction markets. Both DraftKings and FanDuel launched prediction platforms in 2025 and the products are currently available across all 50 states.
This makes it an opportune moment to launch a national app, as operators have at least some kind of service they can offer players in every single state from California to New Jersey.
DraftKings has already said average customer acquisition costs have dropped as much as 80% for its prediction market app, since they introduced the all in-one-service.
The rise of platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket has been a key worry for existing US sportsbooks. These operators offer financial market style contracts where people put down money on predicting the results of events (including sports). Because it’s regulated by the CFTC as a financial instrument and not gambling, the model is currently legal in all 50 states.
It has gone from a niche political polling tool to multi-billion dollar annual market in just a few short years. Which of course has seen the big players also jump in.
DraftKings’ prediction market was off to a slow start, but company bosses say it rocketed in popularity after they launched the all-in-one app with sports betting, casino and prediction markets in one place. It now says more than $1 billion was traded on its prediction markets across April.
Cross-Selling and Personalized Bonus Offers are the Future
Up until now, due to legal requirements and technical considerations, major operators tended to keep their sportsbook, casino, lottery and DFS bonus offers as completely separate.
For example consider this list of US casino bonuses provided by Casino.org. Players use these resources to assess their options in a crowded market, cutting through marketing hype with concrete details on the T&Cs compared side-by-side.
You won’t find many casino offers combined with sports betting or lottery on these pages. But that could soon be changing.
DraftKings has even mooted dynamic bonuses that can be customised depending on the exact parts of the app players use or available to them. This is made a lot easier for operators, when they can track players through one account across all the different sections of the business.
For example, it’s inefficient to constantly send sports betting promos to a player who only engages with casino games. With these new apps that inefficiency can be tweaked. For example, a player could receive a bonus offer to bet $10 on sports and receive free casino spins. Or the other way around. Or make a lottery purchase, to earn sportsbook odds boosts.
This super-app model looks likely to become the new norm over the next few years, given the apparent massive success of DraftKings’ initial launch.
However, not everyone will be pleased with this development. Criticisms of prediction markets aren’t going anywhere, and neither are many of the regulatory and legal pressures against them. When you add in the expanded cross-selling of these super apps you have a recipe for increased regulatory scrutiny. Therefore, despite the obvious market appeal for operators and customers, expansion of super apps might not be plain sailing in all cases. But it looks likely operators will continue to move in this direction anyway.
