The Mobile Home Screen Comes of Age

Mobile Posse Infographic

Today, there is clear demand for custom home screen solutions to simplify how consumers access and utilize mobile apps and their favorite content.

With 40% of all mobile users saying they are extremely interested in a custom home screen solution, the desire to make the mobile experience more dynamic and personalized spans across the most valuable customer segments of the mobile ecosystem.

The greatest interest in a home screen solution can be seen among heavy users who spend large chunks of time on the home screen and tend to touch on numerous apps categories with continued daily use. This is where apps developers see the biggest profits and marketshare as heavy users are two to six times more likely than monthly users to proactively make an apps purchase or acquisition. This segment also checks their home screen three times more than average.

The Race for the Home Screen: An Infographic

The home screen is the next frontier in mobile marketing, offering incredible opportunities for app developers, publishers, even OEM and O/S providers. In Android devices, the home screen is flexible enough to deliver rich, relevant experiences to users, and its potential for marketing success led Bessemer Venture Partners to that $1 Billion per ¼ valuation.

Not surprisingly, the race for home screen ownership is on, and our recent “The Ultimate Guide to the Next Big Wave in Mobile: The Home Screen and the Race for the Homescreen Infographic illustrate not only a timeline of home screen efforts, but also the frequency with which those efforts are occurring. You can see how tremendously the cadence has picked up over the last two years.

The Mobile Home Screen Landscape

With Bessemer Ventures valuing the mobile home screen as more than a billion per ¼”, its no wonder why we’re beginning to see what will likely become mobile’s next big turf war. In the last 12 months, the mobile home screen landscape has expanded, and as more companies realize the value of the real estate, they’re trying to stake a claim – often, an exclusive claim.

In this blog post we’re taking a quick look at who’s on the field, and more importantly, what it takes to not just compete… but to win. Sure, we may be biased, but with seven years of history and the world’s most popular home screen solution, we’re also pretty darn knowledgeable. So we’re going to break it down for you.

Why the Home Screen Drives Better Engagement

If you’ve ever had a deliberation with your team about whether you should be developing a native app or a mobile site, chew on this: the home screen is where it’s at. Need proof? A recent Arbitron study showed that Mobile Posse’s home screen powered news reader application inspired more than 88 sessions per month versus Facebook’s 73.8 and Gmail’s 44.3. Need more proof? Our monthly reach was over 95% higher than any other app, and time spent on the app was second only to Facebook.