The Home Screen Is The Most Valuable Real Estate In Mobile

The home screen, you look at it every day, multiple times per day, on your iPhone or your iPad, it is definitely the most valuable piece of screen real estate in the current mobile computing age. It’s home to all your favorite apps and its the first thing you see whenever you swipe past the lock screen.

Why is it so valuable? Because it’s a carefully curated experience by the owner of the device, most people spend a good amount of time ensuring that their home screen is reflective of their smartphone usage, so that the apps they like to use are easily accessible and so they don’t miss any notifications from a particular app. And you know what’s funny about the pain staking time spent on app curation for the home screen? It deteriorates rather quickly as you move past the first page of apps.

It’s almost as if, those other pages of apps don’t matter. And in a way, they don’t. How often do you swipe past your home screen? The purpose of the home screen is to have all your favorite and most-used apps up front, and with the ability to create folders it’s easy to store more of your favorite apps on the home screen than ever before. Once you stop using a particular app, it gets relegated to page two or beyond to (almost) never be used again, or worse — it gets uninstalled.

Have you ever once shared a screenshot of a page on your iPhone or iPad that wasn’t your home screen? Of course not. In fact, all of the websites where you share those types of screenshots, ask you to share your home screen, because it’s interesting to see what other people consider to be their favorite and most important apps. It’s sort of like a weird method of app discovery (in a voyeuristic way).

What it really comes down to is that the home screen is the only screen that matters and your app has to be on it (at some point) to be successful, because once you’re bumped to page two or beyond, forget about it.

With that said, if you’re curious, here’s my current home screen.