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.

Flurry Rates the Most Stellar Apps, But How Bright are They When It Comes to Engagement?

In March 2013, Flurry introduced a Klout-like rating system for mobile apps, and we’re glad they did. This was one of those needs we didn’t realize we needed: with such a crowded app market and only user ratings to go by, an industry rating system will be helpful. After all, the app economy isn’t easy to succeed in, and this rating system addresses one of the key challenges. Namely, whether you’re earning revenue from in-app ads or offering a “freemium” app, if you can’t retain users, you’re not making a dime.

Accordingly, Flurry notes that the most successful and profitable apps are the ones that users keep and engage with the longest. But shockingly only 15 percent of apps have retention rates of 37 percent or higher. So many apps out there can quickly attract lots of downloads, but the novelty wears off quickly and they either get deleted or left to stagnate.