Looking for games for my friend. She’s mostly looking for a casual timewaster for a bit of enjoyable escapism. She historically liked some of the “merge games” where it’s about merging icons on a grid, and a couple of the more traditional idle games but its so hard to find any without summy practices like dark patterns and abusive monitization.
So, what are some good casual mobile games? Ideally, the sort of thing your grandma could enjoy, but without the scummy practices that are widespread.
Edit: I’m looking for more “pure” casual games, rather than ones that are primarily puzzle or arcade games. Something more akin to Cookie Clicker, those old shovelware hidden object games, or Bejeweled’s zen mode rather than Tetris or Brickbreaker.
All the native Android games I have played have already been suggested, so I could suggest using GameNative or similar to emulate some neat indie titles.
If you like retro games, you could also emulate your legally obtained ;) titles from GameBoy to PS2 to Dreamcast. I like using Retroarch for most of my emulation on my computer and I believe it exists on Android too. Dolphin is great for GameCube and Wii games, NetherSX2 for PS2. There are plenty of other good emulators too, each with varying degrees of feature set, compatibility, and stability.
On iOS, you have Delta (which focuses on older Nintendo titles), and not much else (Apple’s fault for having closed app ecosystem and not having the best support for things like JIT)