Three-quarters of UK fast-food restaurants now run loyalty programmes, and 93% of those incorporate gamified elements such as spin wheels, progress bars, streak rewards, and daily challenges. Open Loyalty’s industry trends research declared gamification the top loyalty priority for 2026, with visual progress bars appealing to 81% of consumers surveyed. But the Apadmi Mobile Customer Loyalty Report, published just weeks ago, tells a different story from the other side of the counter: 32% of shoppers cite “too many notifications” as their single biggest frustration with loyalty apps. Gamification has gone from a differentiator to a default. The question the industry needs to ask is whether it has also gone from engaging to exhausting.
The saturation point
Retail is the largest gamification segment globally, accounting for nearly 28% of market share in 2025, and the industry is projected to reach roughly $190 billion by 2034. Every major supermarket app has a challenge. Every coffee chain has a streak. Every fashion brand has a tier. The mechanic that felt fresh when Starbucks popularised it now appears in almost every category, from grocery to quick-service restaurants to beauty to fuel. And Open Loyalty’s own language is revealing: gamification is now a “baseline expectation rather than a differentiating novelty.” That is the industry body calling time on the competitive advantage, even as it recommends retailers invest more.
When 93% of loyalty apps in a single category use the same mechanics, those mechanics stop being a reason to choose one brand over another. They become table stakes, expected but no longer exciting. The spin wheel that surprised a shopper in 2022 is the spin wheel that every competitor also offers in 2026. Salesforce found that 74% of consumers switched brands in 2024, despite the explosion in gamified loyalty offerings. The mechanics are everywhere. The switching has not slowed down.
The notification problem
The Apadmi report, which surveyed over a thousand consumers across the UK, Poland, Germany, and the Netherlands alongside 50 global retailers, quantified what many shoppers feel instinctively. The top frustration is not poor design or weak rewards. It is volume. Thirty-two per cent named “too many notifications” as the biggest problem with loyalty apps. A further 26% said the reward value was not worthwhile, and 21% cited poor connectivity in store.
What makes the data particularly useful is the gap it exposes between what retailers think shoppers want and what shoppers actually say they want. Seventy-eight per cent of brands believe customers are looking for more personalisation. Only 13% of shoppers say personalisation is the most important factor in their loyalty to a brand. When asked directly what would make them download a retail app in the first place, shoppers ranked exclusive pricing first at 30%, followed by first-purchase discounts at 28% and loyalty schemes at 16%. Gamification did not appear as a standalone driver. The industry is investing in complexity. Shoppers are asking for clarity.
Among younger consumers, the selectivity is even sharper. Seventy per cent of all shoppers belong to three or fewer loyalty schemes, but among 18 to 24-year-olds, the figure rises to 84%. The generation most comfortable with digital experiences is being the most economical about which apps earn their attention. And 39% of brands surveyed by Apadmi admitted their app is not working as effectively as they would like, with just 11% saying their mobile loyalty scheme and CRM programme are fully aligned.
48 apps, 13 used – the fight for screen space
Every gamified loyalty feature generates at least one notification. Each notification competes with between 46 and 63 others arriving on the same device each day, according to Airship’s 2025 Mobile Consumer Habits study. That is the environment the spin wheel lives in — not a clean, focused experience but a crowded inbox where attention is rationed by the second.
Amplitude’s UK research, which surveyed 2,000 smartphone users, found that the average phone carries 48 apps but the owner regularly engages with just 13. Seventy-three per cent of installed apps are gathering dust. Forty-four per cent of consumers intentionally limit new downloads to avoid clutter, and 28% regularly delete apps they no longer use. When a loyalty app fails to deliver immediate value, the consequences are swift: 58% of UK consumers said they would abandon a brand entirely after a frustrating app experience, and 35% would delete an app within minutes if it did not work properly. Eighty-five per cent said they would rather have a basic-looking app that works reliably than a polished one with glitches.
The fight is no longer about engagement. It is about survival on the home screen. A gamified loyalty app that adds notifications without adding clear value is not competing against other loyalty apps. It is competing against every other app on the phone and losing to the ones that deliver utility without noise.
What cuts through when everything is gamified
A study published in the Italian Journal of Marketing in 2025 captured the dependency problem at the heart of gamified retail. Researchers documented a significant decline in user activity, including logins, bill payments, and on-time repayments, after gamified features such as spin wheels, scratch cards, and raffles were removed from an app. The absence of the mechanics led users to disengage entirely. That finding does not prove gamification works. It proves gamification creates a dependency on the mechanic itself rather than a relationship with the brand. The moment the game stops, the behaviour stops with it.
That distinction matters as the market matures. Seventy per cent of shoppers say they feel overwhelmed or that it takes too long to find options they like when shopping online, according to Attentive’s 2026 personalisation research across the UK, US, and Australia. The answer to overwhelm is not a louder game. It is a simpler proposition. Amplitude’s research found that 56% of Gen Z are attracted to super apps, single platforms integrating multiple services rather than downloading a separate gamified app for every brand. The appetite is not for more mechanics but for fewer touchpoints that do more.
The same preference for simplification appears in other crowded digital markets. UK casino reviews, price-comparison services and product guides all serve a similar purpose: reducing a large number of competing offers into information that can be assessed more quickly. Retail loyalty apps need to provide the same clarity rather than adding another layer of games, alerts and decisions for shoppers to process.
Gamification worked when it was new. It is no longer new. The retailers who will navigate the next phase of loyalty successfully are not the ones building a better spin wheel. They are the ones who recognise that what shoppers wanted all along was not entertainment but value delivered clearly, without friction, and without 63 notifications competing for attention on the same Tuesday afternoon.
