How Mobile Apps Are Changing At-Home Leisure in the UK
UK evenings now start with a screen that fits in a palm, not with a channel guide. A phone unlocks, icons light up, and a living room can tilt toward whatever the next app offers: a playlist, a clip, a crossword, a group chat, a live score.
The change feels ordinary because it is repeated daily, but it has altered the mechanics of staying in. Entertainment arrives through the same device that handles messages, payments, and reminders, and leisure choices can switch in seconds, from streaming and casual games to regulated options such as popular online slots in the UK.
Mobile apps have become a primary gateway to at-home leisure across the UK, reshaping what people watch, play, and pay for, and how quickly those choices can change. The shift is evident in regulator reporting and in the everyday texture of evenings: more personalised, more fragmented, and more phone-led.
The Phone Replaces the Living-Room Remote
Ofcom’s Online Nation Report 2025 reported that adults spend an average of 4 hours and 30 minutes per day online across smartphones, tablets, and computers.
The same report noted that most time online is spent on smartphones, with adults using an average of 41 apps per month. Leisure sits alongside maps, banking, and messaging, not in a separate lane.
“Adults now spend an average of four and a half hours online a day.”
Access at home remains widespread. Ofcom also reported that in 2025, 5% of UK residents aged 16 and over reported not having internet access at home, implying that 95% of that age group had home access.
Streaming and Short Video Redraw the Evening
Long-form streaming still dominates the main block of many nights, but short video has expanded into the gaps, the minutes between tasks, and the second-screen layer during TV viewing.
Reuters, summarising Ofcom’s findings, reported that Britons watched YouTube for an average of 51 minutes a day in 2025 on smartphones, tablets, and PCs. The figure signals a settled habit, and it blurs the old boundary between television time and phone time.
Games and Second-Screen Habits Become Routine
Mobile games have expanded beyond quick puzzles to long-running titles centered on daily sessions. They share a simple advantage: they start fast, and they can fit around other activities.
In practice, gaming often sits inside the wider second-screen evening, with a podcast playing, messages arriving, a match on the TV, and a game running in the foreground of the phone.
An at-Home Leisure App Map
One way to understand the change is to map the categories that now coexist on a home screen. The shift is not only in what people consume but also in how quickly they change lanes.
The table below summarises common app-led leisure categories, their forms at home, and the behavioural shifts they represent.
| Leisure category | What it looks like at home | Typical app examples (generic) | What changed vs pre-app habits |
| Streaming and catch-up | TV on, phone nearby, episodes chosen on demand | Subscription streamers, broadcaster catch-up apps | Viewing shifts from schedules to on-demand and box sets |
| Short video | Quick hits between chores and chats | Short-form video platforms | Leisure breaks into micro-sessions |
| Music and audio | Background listening, headphones at home | Music streaming, podcasts, and radio apps | Listening becomes more personalised and less broadcast-led |
| Mobile games | Puzzle bursts, longer progression games | Casual games, live-service titles | Gaming becomes a spare-minute habit, not a planned event |
| Social and messaging | Sharing clips, reacting in group chats | Messaging apps, social feeds | Leisure becomes more social, but less focused on one shared screen |
| Fitness and wellbeing | Guided workouts, meditation sessions | Workout apps, mindfulness apps | Exercise shifts indoors and on demand |
| iGaming | Casino and betting sessions on phones and tablets | Licensed operator apps and sites | A regulated leisure lane grows inside the same mobile ecosystem |
| Local discovery and booking | Choosing plans from the sofa, then booking | Maps, booking, and event apps | Home becomes the planning hub for going out later |
Across categories, the pattern is consistent, leisure is quicker to start, easier to personalise, and more likely to overlap with other activities in the same room.
Subscriptions, Small Payments, and the Rise of Mobile iGaming
At-home entertainment increasingly arrives via subscriptions, video and music platforms, creator platforms, and niche hobby apps. The charges often look modest in isolation, but the stack can grow quietly across a household.
Alongside subscriptions sits the in-app purchase, a payment offered at the point of friction. A game sells extra turns, a platform sells an upgrade, and the checkout flow feels familiar because it is routed through phone-based payment systems.
A regulated segment of the broader app economy is online gambling. The Gambling Commission’s annual industry statistics for April 2024 to March 2025 reported that remote casino, betting, and bingo generated £7.8 billion in gross gambling yield, and that online casino games generated £5.0 billion, of which £4.2 billion was from slots games.
“Online casino games dominate the sector, generating £5.0 billion in GGY, £4.2 billion of which was from slots games.”
In the broader discovery environment, iGaming sits beside streaming and mobile gaming on the same device, with visibility shaped by advertising rules, app-store placement, and licensing controls.
Attention becomes more fragmented, and evenings run in parallel
As leisure shifts onto phones, attention is pulled into shorter bursts. Notifications interrupt shared viewing, group chats run during films, and feeds encourage constant sampling rather than a single settled choice.
The social side has not disappeared, but it often happens in-app. Clips are forwarded as conversations, recommendations travel through messages, and households spend more time together in the same room while engaging in different activities on different screens.
H2: Closing Thoughts…
Older forms of leisure have not vanished, but the route into them has changed. More evenings begin with app menus, recommendations, and quick transactions, and the phone increasingly acts as both venue and remote.
Regulator reporting frames the shift in time online, app use, and industry statistics. The lived version is simpler, the sofa moment arrives, and the first reach is often for the phone.