The general preference in the mobile gambling industry has been to opt for Apple’s iOS and a report released by Nielsen goes some way to explaining why this is the case. According to their numbers, the top ten apps on Google’s Android market account for just under half of the time spent by users using apps. 43% is the number put on the amount of time spent by users on the top ten apps. When you extend that to the top 50 apps, the number moves to 61% of in-app time.
Don Kellogg, Nielsen’s director of telecom research and insights, commented, “With more than 250,000 Android apps available at the time of this writing, that means the remaining 249,950-plus apps have to compete for the remaining 39 percent of the pie.”
This issue has been something that mobile gaming industry firms have complained about before and is one of the major drawbacks of Google’s open source system. Even more interesting for the mobile gambling industry were the figures compiled by Nielsen showing how users spend time on their smart phones.
According to the research firm, users spend almost an hour per day (56 minutes) interacting with the web and apps. It’s the split between the two that will have the online gaming industry interested. Nielsen found that 67% of this time is spent by users in apps whereas only 33% of the time is via a browser itself. This will give app developers in the online gaming industry more of an idea as to how they want to market their product. The problem with the app though will be people actually finding the blasted thing. Getting in that top 50 probably isn’t going to be particularly easy.
