Apple’s iOS maintained its “strong lead” in mobile game revenue in the first quarter of 2013, although Google Play saw faster growth, IDC and App Annie noted at this week’s E3 gaming conference.

According to the companies, Apple earned 2.3 times the revenue of Google Play in the quarter. However, the revenue of Google Play doubled compared with the last quarter of 2012, a faster pace than growth in the App Store.

The US and Japan still drive most of the growth in the iOS gaming market, although China also saw strong growth in the sequential quarters. Japan, South Korea and the US were the motors for Google Play, with the Asian markets seeing “astonishing growth”.

The installed base of mobile and portable devices used for gaming will grow from nearly 800 million in 2012 to more than 1.2 billion by 2014, with Android-powered devices seeing the strongest growth in market share – at the expense of gaming-optimised handhelds such as the Nintendo DS and Sony PlayStation Vita.

iOS will also see growth, while the share of other smartphone and tablet platforms is on the slide.

According to IDC and App Annie, revenue this year is on track to top $12 billion, with in-app purchases generating the lion’s share (51 per cent), followed by paid app sales (44 per cent) and advertising (5 per cent).

Lewis Ward, gaming research manager at IDC, said: “Although the audience for smartphone and tablet games has grown larger than that of gaming-optimised handhelds, devices like 3DS and Vita continue to realise significantly higher ARPUs. As smartphone and tablet games get more sophisticated it will be interesting to see if the genre preference distinctions that exist today will close.”