Smartphone gaming is the world's global pastime

The average Android smartphone owner spends 37 minutes a day gaming with arcade and action titles proving the most popular, though casual games are a close second.

The average Android smartphone owner spends 37 minutes a day gaming with arcade and action titles proving the most popular, though casual games are a close second.

Flurry Analytics, the company behind the claims, chose to study only Android handsets, due to the greater diversity of devices and owners and the greater international reach of the platform, and picked a representative global sample of 60,000 devices to study.

It found that although the global average is 37 minutes a day, there are a number of countries that over-index, chief among them being the US where the average time spent gaming every day is 51.8 minutes.

Germany is second (47.1 minutes), and Russia rounds out the top three with 40.8 minutes a day. At the other end of the scale, Chinese smartphone users average 28.6 minutes of gaming a day putting the country in 10th place just behind France in ninth place (30.1 minutes) and the UK in eight with 32.4 minutes.

And although the act of gaming itself appears to be a truly global smartphone-owning phenomenon, the games that people choose to play differ from region to region.
Overall, action and arcade games and casual games are the two most popular categories -- for example in China, 53 % of game time is taken up with action and arcade titles, and South Koreans dedicate 74 % of their gaming minutes to them. In Brazil, Russia and Mexico, casual gaming is most popular with arcade and action titles taking second place.

However, in Germany and in Italy, 53 % and 55 % respectively of gaming time is devoted to brain and puzzle titles (it accounts for just 17% of time in the US) and in India cards and casino games account for 33 % of gaming time, making them equally as popular as action games (33% too).

Sports games on the other hand are extremely niche and taste varies by country. In India they account for 4 % of gaming time and the top titles are all focused on cricket, while in the UK, where sports games also account for 4 % of gaming time, football games are the most popular.