India accounted for 17.8 per cent of global Android game downloads as of 14 July 2025, cementing its place among the world's largest mobile gaming markets, according to a report by Mintegral released on Tuesday. Despite the scale of downloads, the country's monetisation patterns diverge sharply from global benchmarks, the report noted.

India's Android-First Gaming Landscape

Android dominates India's gaming ecosystem in a way that has no parallel globally. The platform accounted for 97.5 per cent of all game downloads in India, compared with 85.9 per cent globally. India's share of global iOS game downloads, by contrast, stood at just 2.8 per cent, underscoring the near-total reliance on Android for user acquisition, product testing, and audience growth.

This Android concentration makes India a critical but structurally distinct market — one where platform economics, advertising yields, and player spending habits follow their own logic.

Cost Efficiency and Advertising Economics

India remains one of the most cost-efficient markets for gaming user acquisition worldwide, according to the Mintegral report. The estimated difference between global Android cost-per-install (CPI) benchmarks and India's average CPI stands at a striking 19.9-fold. For advertisers, this translates into high-volume reach at a fraction of the cost seen in mature markets.

The gap in advertising yields is similarly wide. The report flagged an approximately 22-fold difference between global Android rewarded-video eCPM (effective cost per mille) benchmarks and Indian market eCPMs, highlighting the challenge of converting download scale into advertising revenue at global rates.

How India's Gaming Revenue Is Generated

In-app advertising (IAA) drives 63 per cent of India's overall gaming revenue across platforms — a markedly different mix from global norms. However, within Android specifically, the picture flips: about 70 per cent of Android gaming revenue is generated through in-app purchases (IAP), pointing to platform-specific monetisation strategies that publishers are calibrating genre by genre.

Casual, hypercasual, and mid-core or hardcore games together accounted for 57.5 per cent of game downloads, offering large-scale user acquisition opportunities — though monetisation models varied significantly across these genres.

User Acquisition Channels: India vs Global Publishers

The report found a notable gap in user acquisition sophistication between leading global gaming apps and Indian publishers. Top global puzzle games utilise an average of 20 acquisition channels, compared with 14 in India. Card and board games use 17 channels globally against just 9 in the Indian market.

This narrower channel mix could limit reach and scale for Indian publishers competing against global titles with deeper media-buying infrastructure.

Distribution Channels and What Comes Next

Google's ecosystem remained the largest contributor to gaming installs in India. Notably, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and alternative app distribution channels together accounted for around one-fourth of installs — a share that reflects the diversity of Android device ecosystems in the country and the growing role of pre-installed or carrier-distributed apps.

As India's gaming user base continues to expand, the central question for publishers and advertisers will be whether monetisation infrastructure can scale to match the country's download dominance — a gap the industry is only beginning to close.