If you want to see what mobile apps are the most popular, you can do a number of things.
You can look at the mobile apps that have the most downloads by checking out the leaderboards in the iOS and Android app stores. They will differ from country to country. You can use a service like AppAnnie to help you do this kind of work.
You can try to figure out what apps have the most MAUs and DAUs. That is a lot harder. There are some services out there that attempt to do that. comScore’s Mobile Metrix will give you that data. It’s a paid service so not everyone can afford it. Full disclosure, I used to be on comScore’s board and still own stock in the company.
Another interesting metric is homescreen real estate. Being on a user’s homescreen will tell you something about the loyalty the user has to the app and it is most likely correlated to MAUs and DAUs (why would you have an app on your homescreen that you don’t use regularly?).
I’ve been pretty obsessed with homescreen real estate and have posted my homescreen here on AVC a number of times. My homescreen moves around a lot, particularly when I’m traveling and need certain apps more than others. For example, the Delta and Uber apps are on my homescreen while I’m in europe because I’m using both frequently while I’m over here.
My friend John Borthwick is also obsessed about homescreen real estate and he and his colleagues at Betaworks have built a service to aggregate homescreens and then create a data service around them. The service is called homescreen.is and it’s pretty simple. If you have an iPhone, you download the app, you take a screenshot of your homescreen, and you upload it to homescreen.is via the mobile app.
Each user has a profile on the site with their current homescreen on it. Here is mine. There is a leaderboard, of course, which is here. And you can see some interesting things, like the top homescreen apps of people who follow someone on Twitter. Here’s that data for me. It turns out the top homescreen apps of my followers on Twitter is not much different from the top homescreen apps for all homescreen users.
Right now, this data is heavily skewed to the geek/tech insider crowd. You can see that in the data. 1Password, Pocket, and Overcast are top apps on Homescreen.is. They are not top 100 apps, maybe not even top 250 apps. But they are very popular in the same crowd that is using Homescreen right now.
Can Homescreen go viral and get mass adoption such that its data will be more mainstream? Maybe. Sharing homescreens seems like something everyone would want to do. Making Homescreen.is fun, engaging, and viral seems like the thing they need to do to get the app on everyone’s phones. An android version would be good too.
In the long run, Homescreen.is could be a great tool for discovery. The mobile app ecosystem could use some help with that.
