The average Android gamer spends 37 minutes a day playing on their smartphone or tablet, according to research from mobile analytics firm Flurry.
Based on data from 60,000 Android devices, the company claims that Android gamers in the US are the keenest in the world, averaging 51.8 minutes of daily gameplay.
Germany (47.1 minutes) Russia (40.8) and Italy (38.5) all over-index in the company’s rankings, although British Android gamers average 32.4 minutes, according to Flurry’s data.
The company’s research into which genres are most popular won’t come as a surprise: arcade and action titles top the list, followed by casual games.
However, it teases out some national differences: German Android gamers average 66 monthly sessions in brain and puzzle games, while Indians average 68 monthly sessions in cards and casino titles.
“Arcade & Action and Casual are clearly the gaming categories with the broadest appeal. In almost all of the top gaming countries, at least half of gamers engage with these games,” wrote Flurry’s Jarah Euston in a blog post.
The figures are the latest data on the booming mobile games market. Earlier in the week, the UK’s Internet Advertising Bureau released a report on British gaming habits. It revealed that 54% of people surveyed cited smartphones as their favourite gaming platform – ahead of computers (51%), consoles (45%) and tablets (44%).
Android specifically is an increasingly important platform for games. In June, Google said there were more than 1bn active Android users globally, up from 530m the year before.
A glance at the Top Grossing Apps chart on Android’s UK Google Play store reveals that 28 of the 30 most lucrative apps at the time of writing are games, with only WhatsApp Messenger and Sky Sports Mobile TV breaking up the games party.
Historically, Android has been a lower priority than Apple’s iOS for many mobile games developers, with waits of weeks and sometimes months between games being released for iOS then ported to Android.
However, the sheer scale of Android, and increased use of tools like Unity that reduce the headaches of cross-platform development, have been bringing those delays down, as well as spurring more simultaneous launches across both platforms.
• 40 best Android games of 2014 (so far)
