Candy Crush Saga helps King account for a quarter of all time spent gaming on Android

Social publisher King is off to a strong start in 2014 by dominating other companies when it comes to how much time people spend in their games.

Across all of its games, King took up 26 percent of the time smartphone owners spent playing games on Android devices in the first quarter of the year, according to Strategy Analytics’ AppOtix data platform. That’s more than any other single publisher, and Candy Crush Saga — King’s match-3 puzzler with deep social integration — made up the biggest portion of this. This is an important factor that King will likely try to build on to shore up its share price toward its March debut of $22.50. Mobile apps made up a $16 billion market worldwide lastyear, and it is continuing to grow into 2014.