The smartphone homescreen is among the world’s most valuable digital real estate. App-makers’ fortunes are often tied to how many active users they can attract and retain, so getting on your homescreen—where you’ll potentially see their icons dozens of times per day—is the holy grail.
The smartphone homescreen is among the world’s most valuable digital real estate. App-makers’ fortunes are often tied to how many active users they can attract and retain, so getting on your homescreen—where you’ll potentially see their icons dozens of times per day—is the holy grail.
Homescreen, a new project from New York startup lab Betaworks, is tracking homescreen apps as they’re submitted by users. So far, they’ve scanned more than 13,000 homescreens, identifying almost 500,000 different apps. You can see several submissions on Twitter $TWTR, hashtagged #Homescreen.
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Because of the nature of the service, which requires users to download an iOS app and submit a screenshot of your own homescreen, the responses are probably tilted toward tech early-adopter types. Nevertheless, the most-popular list includes mostly familiar names. (Note that they’ve excluded Apple $AAPL’s built-in apps.)
A few observations:
The Homescreen team also calculated which apps were the most popular additions to peoples’ docks, for easy access: WhatsApp, TweetBot, Mailbox, and Spotify $SPOT, which are popular replacements for Apple’s Messaging, Mail, and Music apps.
