South Asian Real Money Player Device & Brand Preferences Revealed
What devices and brands are most preferred by real money players in South Asia is no longer a trade secret, as one of the prominent online casino operators in the region – Casino Days (located at casinodays.com/in/casino) has shared some of their internal aggregate data.
Gaming companies use such anonymous internal statistics to determine how to optimise their platforms for the actual technology used by their customers, as well as to gain a better overall understanding of their players and the choices they tend to make.
Desktops and Tablets Have Lost the Battle
One of the major findings that can be derived from the shared Casino Days data is that real money gaming in South Asia is a mobile-first activity, while desktop and tablet devices are somewhere in the periphery.
Smartphones are responsible for a whopping 96.6% of gaming sessions in the region, data shows. Computers carry a modest weight of 2.9%, and bigger handheld devices like tablets have a negligible share as small as 0.5%.
Online casinos began their journey through history exclusively on computers in the mid 1990’s, but continuous advances in digital technology, the appearance of reliable smartphones, and the developments in network infrastructure and speed have moved remote casino gaming to mobile for good.
In more recent years, the rising productivity of smartphone hardware achieved at ever decreasing costs, especially through local manufacturing initiatives in India and Vietnam, coupled with cheap mobile data plans, have led to even greater proliferation of mobile gaming and gambling in the South Asian region.
Xiaomi Leads, Followed by Vivo and Samsung
Casino Days internal data on particular brands reveals that the global leaders in smartphone sales do not necessarily command leading shares of the market among South Asian real money players.
While Apple and Samsung hold the lead in global mobile vendor market shares (31.44% and 25.27% respectively as of May 2023), and Xiaomi is only third at a solid distance (with a share of 11.13%), Apple is used by barely 2.29% of Casino Days players, and Samsung has dropped down to third position with 18.1%.
Xiaomi has assumed the top place with a share of 21.9%, closely followed by Vivo with 20.79%. Devices by Realme (11.43%), Oppo (11.23%), and OnePlus (4.07%) all outrank products by the Cupertino-based US tech giant.
The Casino Days internal datasets reveal a massive dominance of Android, far greater than the dominance exerted by the open-source operating system (OS) on the global scale currently measured at 67.72%.
Among the main factors for the success of Android devices in the region, according to the market analysts at Casino Days, is the far greater local integration of Google Pay compared to the equivalent services by Apple Pay, and the fact that the open-source OS provides a much more convenient and easier platform for developers to create apps and get them registered.
“And, with influencers and tech reviews putting emphasis on Android devices, the choice of mobile phone brand and OS becomes easy; Android has a much wider range of products and caters to the Asian online casino market in ways that Apple can’t due to technical limitations,” the researchers add.