Method

How Loon Picks rates apps, and how it gets paid

Five inputs make a score. None of them is the size of a welcome bonus.

The five inputs

Store rating, weighted by ratings count and re-read 14 days after each release. A 4.6 from 28,000 reviews outranks a 4.9 from 200.

Install size in MB, scored against what the app actually does. Live dealer plus in play plus a full casino lobby earns its megabytes; a slots wrapper at 180MB does not.

Taps to withdraw, counted from the home screen on a verified account with a payout method saved, plus any reverse window that follows.

Stability, taken from review text after each release and sorted by the screen players name. Speed of the fix counts as much as the frequency of the fault.

Terms legibility, meaning how much work it takes to find the wagering multiplier, the expiry and the payout window in the published terms, and how many screens sit between a reader and them. That is a property of the document. Nothing in the score measures a company against what it advertised, because that is not a comparison this desk is in a position to make.

How a score comes together

The three headline numbers set the band. Stability and terms legibility move a position within it, usually by one or two places.

A score is never rounded up to make a link look better. Operators sitting at 6.8 stay at 6.8.

Nothing here is first hand testing. Data is drawn from store listings, the operator's published terms and patterns reported across player accounts, and the copy says which is which.

How this site makes money

Loon Picks may be paid when a reader opens an account through a link on this site. That is the business model, stated plainly, and it applies across the ranked list, the teardowns and the daily feed.

Payment arrives after a reader signs up, not before a page is written. It arrives at different rates from different operators, and some links pay nothing at all.

That payment changes nothing about the ranking, the score or the wording. The order is set by the five inputs above and then the links are attached, in that sequence.

What money cannot buy

A position on the list. A higher score. Removal of a critical line. A skip card pulled from the feed. An operator without an app being listed at all.

Nobody outside the two people on the masthead sees a page before it publishes, and no operator gets a preview of a rank change.

Where a commercial arrangement exists on a specific page, the page says so near the link rather than in small print at the bottom.

Corrections

Numbers age fast. A version ships, a cashier changes, a tap count is wrong within a week.

Corrections are made on the page with a date stamp and the old figure left visible. Send a challenge with a version number to [email protected] and it gets checked against the store listing the same week.