Idle Games on Google Play in 2026: What 847 Games Tell Us

We collected the store pages of 847 idle games with 10,000+ installs. How they make money, what their most expensive item costs, how they are rated, how old the hits are and which words sell.

How big is the idle game genre on Android, how do these games make money, and does it show in their ratings? Instead of guessing, we collected the Google Play store pages of every idle game we could find and looked at the numbers. This is what 847 idle games with at least 10,000 installs each tell us, as of September 25, 2026.

How we built the dataset

We are a small studio that makes idle games, so we wanted numbers we could trust for our own decisions. Here is exactly how we got them, so you can judge them too:

1. On September 25, 2026 we ran 151 searches on Google Play in the US store, in English: 94 idle-related searches such as idle rpg, idle tycoon, incremental game and afk game, plus searches for puzzle, RPG, offline and no-ads games. Google Play returns up to 30 apps per search.
2. For each of the 1,960 apps we found, we saved the public facts on its store page: installs, rating and number of ratings, the Contains ads and In-app purchases labels with their price range, category and tags, release date and last update.
3. We counted a game as an idle game when its own store page calls it one: the title, the short description or Google's tags say idle, incremental, AFK, clicker or tycoon, or its description calls it an idle, incremental or AFK game. That gave 1,071 idle games.
4. We kept the 847 with at least 10,000 installs, to leave out apps that are too new or too small to have real ratings.

Install counts are the figures in Google Play's page data (the store shows them rounded, as 1M+ or 10M+). Ratings are Google's averages, and we only compare ratings of games with at least 100 of them.

What this data cannot tell you. It covers the US store only. It depends on what Google's search returns, so it is a large sample, not a census. A few famous idle games never call themselves idle on their store page (Egg, Inc. is one) and are not included. The ad label is declared by each developer. And our own idle games are not in it: Idle Ronin, Idle Summoner and Idle AI Factory came out in September 2026 and do not have 10,000 installs yet.

How big is the idle game market?

Very big, and very uneven. The 847 games add up to about 3.94 billion installs. The median game has about 735,000, and the ten biggest take almost a quarter of all installs (23.6%).

These are the ten most installed idle games on Google Play in our data:

Tycoons dominate the top of the list. Google files more than half of all idle games (54%) under Simulation, followed by Role Playing (18%), Casual (13%) and Strategy (6%).

How do idle games make money?

Almost all of them sell something, and most do both: ads and in-app purchases.

• 88.3% carry the Contains ads label.
• 95.0% sell in-app purchases.
• 84.7% do both.
• 10.4% sell in-app purchases but show no ads, which is the model of most big hero collectors, such as AFK Arena and Idle Heroes.
• Only 1.3% have neither. Most of those are paid games, and only 16 idle games in the sample cost money to download.

From our side of the table, this matches how the genre works. Idle games are played in short, frequent sessions, which suits rewarded videos (watch an ad for double income), and they run for months, which suits purchases that speed things up. We explain the whole model in how free mobile games make money.

What does the most expensive item cost?

Google Play shows the price range of every game's in-app items. The top of that range says a lot about who a game is built for.

The median top price is exactly $99.99, and 59.6% of the games that sell anything have an item at $99.99 or more. Thirty-eight games go past $200. Only 5% keep every item under $10. The cheapest item, on the other hand, costs $0.99 or less in 69% of them, so almost every game has an easy first purchase.

A $99.99 item does not make a game pay-to-win on its own. Many of them are bundles of currency that a free player earns slowly anyway. But the range is worth a look before you get invested, and games that keep all prices low are rare enough to be a reason to choose them. Our list of F2P-friendly idle games starts from exactly that.

Are idle games with ads rated lower?

This surprised us. Across 786 idle games with at least 100 ratings, the median rating is 4.35 stars, and 28.5% are rated 4.5 or higher. But whether a game shows ads makes almost no difference: games with the ad label have a median of 4.36, games without it 4.33. The price of the most expensive item does not move the rating either (4.30 to 4.36 in every price group).

What does go with a higher rating is size. Games with 10 million or more installs have a median of 4.43, games with 10,000 to 100,000 have 4.22. That is partly because good games grow, and partly because a big game has had years to fix its problems. Either way, a rating from a small game deserves a closer look at its reviews.

The best rated idle games with at least 10,000 ratings were these:

Ratings are not reviews, of course, and a high average can hide a game that changed a lot since most people rated it. Use them as a filter, not a verdict.

Old hits and new games

The genre is not frozen. More idle games in our sample came out in 2024 (131) than in any other year, and 2026 had already produced 100 by the end of September.

The biggest hits are older: the 98 games with 10 million or more installs came out in 2020 on average (median release year), and the top three are from 2016, 2017 and 2021. Still, new games break through. Of the 202 idle games released in 2025 and 2026 with 10,000+ installs, 33 have already passed a million, and one of them, Kingshot, is in the top ten.

Idle games are also live products. 43% were updated in the last 30 days and 65% in the last 90. Among the games with 10 million or more installs, 61% were updated in the last month. Only 3.5% of the sample had not been updated for over a year.

What idle games are called

If you are wondering why every game seems to have idle in its name, you are right: 81.8% of the 847 titles contain the word. That is search optimization at work, since players search for idle games by that word.

After idle come tycoon (28.8% of titles), RPG (17.8%), empire (6.6%), clicker (5.4%) and merge (4.3%). The themes are everyday businesses and fantasy battles more than anything else: farms, cities, factories, heroes, towers and zombies.

How many idle games work offline?

Google tags 41% of these games as Offline, and 64% mention offline play or playing without Wi-Fi in their description. The real share is probably in between: some games only mean offline earnings, not a game that runs without a connection. If offline play matters to you, check the store page for the tag and read our guide to playing Android games offline.

Who makes idle games?

Mostly small teams with one hit. The 847 games come from 542 developers, and 74.7% of those developers have only one game in the sample. A handful of publishers make idle games at scale: Codigames (15 games), Magic Seven (14), SayGames (11), Kolibri Games and Tapps Games (10 each) and Solid Games (9).

Most idle games are made for everyone: 68% are rated Everyone, 18% Everyone 10+, 12% Teen and 2% Mature.

What this means for players

• Assume there are ads and purchases. Nine in ten idle games have both. What differs is how pushy they are, and the store page will not tell you that, so read recent reviews.
• Check the price range before you commit. A game that keeps every item under $10 is built differently from one that sells $299.99 bundles.
• Do not pay for no ads expecting a better game. Ad-free idle games are not rated higher on average.
• Look for recent updates. Most idle games are updated monthly. One that has not changed in a year will not grow with you.
• Trust ratings from big games more than from small ones. Small games have fewer, less reliable ratings.

What this means for developers

We make idle games too, so we read the same numbers for our own work. The genre is crowded (1,071 idle games in our searches alone) and led by games that are years old, but it is not closed: 100 of the 234 idle games from 2026 that our searches found already have 10,000+ installs, and new games still reach the top ten. The data also says that removing ads does not buy a better rating by itself. What goes with good ratings is the thing that makes games grow: being worth playing for a long time.

FAQ

How many idle games are on Google Play?

More than we could count. Our 94 idle searches alone found 1,071 games that call themselves idle, incremental, AFK, clicker or tycoon, and search results stop at 30 per query, so the real number is higher.

What is the most downloaded idle game?

In our data, Idle Miner Tycoon by Kolibri Games, with more than 100 million installs on Google Play (about 175 million in the store's page data).

Do idle games have ads?

Most do: 88% of the idle games in our sample carry the Contains ads label. About 10% sell purchases without ads, and very few have neither. See our list of idle games without forced ads.

Can I use this data?

Yes. The CSV file contains all 847 games. Please link to this page as the source.

Sources

• Google Play store pages (US, English), collected by ONI Games on September 25, 2026, with the open-source google-play-scraper library. Dataset: idle-games-google-play-2026.csv.