Some specific findings by company:

Facebook is the leading non-default app on people’s homescreens. In total, 68.6 percent of homescreens had a Facebook app on them (either Facebook, Messenger, Pages or Instagram). This number is still remarkable but if you consider that more than 50 percent of DAUs for Facebook are mobile only, it isn’t surprising. The more important question for Facebook is, how is the unbundling experience going? In the sample set, 18 percent of devices had just Facebook installed, 12 percent had just Instagram. Thirty-six percent had Facebook and Instagram. Unbundled, single-purpose apps are the way to expand share on the homescreen and Facebook is pulling it’s core desktop experience apart as their audience moves to mobile. The acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp are part of this strategy, yet while this strategy makes sense, it comes with execution risk. Case in point: Poke. One person in the sample had Poke installed on the homescreen.

A full 62 percent of users have at least one Google app on their homescreen and the median Google user has 2 apps on their homescreen. The most popular by a long shot is Google Maps: about 42 percent of users in the sample had Google Maps on their homescreen (Waze is on an additional 5 percent). After maps, the drop off is steep — the next most popular Google app is YouTube, which is on 17 percent of homescreens, Chrome on 17% and then the standard Google app, which is on 11 percent. Google+ is on 8 percent of homescreens in the sample. That is higher than I expected, and it’s interesting given that the primary discovery model on the phone is still under development and it’s likely to be social: Google’s (and Apple’s) relative lack of presence in social is important. Google Drive was on fewer homescreens than I expected (4 percent) — given that Dropbox is on 16 percent. I wonder if the rebranding of Docs into Drive confused users. Owned and operated apps aside, it’s important to add that Google data underpins a lot of core experiences on mobile devices: web search, yes, but also mail, calendars etc. I.e., I would guess that most Mailbox users (now part of Dropbox) use Gmail IMAP — and Mailbox is on a full quarter of people’s homescreens in the sample.

Is it a phone, a camera, or a computer?

Twitter related apps are on 85.5 percent of homescreens. Given that the sample was based on Twitter users there’s sample bias to the Twitter number, but despite that there are some interesting conclusions to draw out of the data. Seventy-nine percent have one Twitter app on their homescreen, 6.5 percent have 2 or more and 14 percent have none — presumably these users use Twitter via the browser or an app not on the homescreen. Vine is on 12 percent of people’s homescreens, which is impressive. But Twitter’s client app is only on 37% of homescreens and third-party clients are on a whopping 55 percent of devices, with one client, Tweetbot, making up a full 49.5 percent of the sampled homescreens. It’s remarkable that a non-Twitter owned client has more market share than Twitter’s client. It’s a byproduct of the early adopter sample bias, but I think it points to the fact these users — myself included — prefer using a different, and more advanced, workflow for Twitter.

Twitter continues to fascinate me. It is an app company with a primary experience that is mobile first. In another time, Twitter might have integrated the Vine service into its web site and mobile in a quest to become a bigger “portal,” but today it is operating it as an unbundled app. I suspect we will see more of those. In 2014, we will see if Twitter can extend the mobile experience and take advantage of the data messaging bus that underlies the platform, build out cards for atomic distribution of content and apps and monetize, as Wall Street expects it to do. It has a lot to do, but, in the long run, I’m long on Twitter. It’s platform is so different to others, so simple: it’s like the Rorschach test of software, simple and open to re-interpretation and adaption. And unlike many of the companies mentioned here Twitter has mobile DNA.

Yahoo apps (branded and non) are on about a quarter of homescreens sampled — but it is acquisitions that have driven this presence. Yahoo-branded apps are on only 11.3 percent of homescreens. Take out Yahoo Weather the number falls to 2.47 percent. Yahoo non-branded properties have a high presence: Flickr is on 6.9 percent of homescreens and Tumblr is on 9.8 percent. This illustrates just how important Tumblr is to the future of Yahoo’s mobile experience; prior to the Tumblr acquisition, the share that Yahoo had of the homescreens was similar to what we have at betaworks.

Microsoft-branded apps are 0 percent of people’s homescreens. Microsoft-owned (i.e., Skype) are on 11.5 percent. In the context of a different era, when Windows competed with OS X, this made sense. In the world we live in today, it doesn’t. It highlights just how irrelevant Microsoft has become for people whose primary computing experience is off the desktop. Furthermore if you consider that Skype’s traffic now represents almost 40 percent of the international calling business. The 12 percent number suggests that Skype is predominantly a desktop service.

Then there are other startups with large presence on homescreens. Evernote is on 24 percent, including mine. Evernote confounds me: on one hand, it’s a great service, on the other hand, when one of my colleagues last year said, “Evernote is the only Windows app on my iPhone,” the analogy made immediate sense. The app is just good enough. It often crashes or fails to sync, and I will be interested to see if it holds share in 2014. What about local? Foursquare is on a full 23 percent of homescreens. I know traditional marketing people will argue this sample is small, and skewed to early adopters, but in doing so they miss a fundamental aspect of networks. The most active users are the most densely connected members of networks and their participation and data isn’t merely an early indicator of success; it’s an unfair advantage. As Foursquare moves into passive recommendations and passive data collection it has the potential to become a very important data set and its presence on a quarter of homescreens speaks to the fact that for local information, for this sample, its brand dominates.

Then there is the list of incredibly well capitalized businesses and huge brands that are still predominantly web apps. AOL has almost no branded presence on homescreens. Its non-branded apps have a small presence, as Huffington Post and Techcrunch were on 0.74 percent of homescreens. Amazon’s position is small; its branded app is on about 3 percent of homescreens in the sample, while the Kindle app is on 6 percent. Pinterest on 6.1 percent of homescreens, eBay on 2.2 percent, Fab on 1 phone, Fancy on 1 phone, and Gilt is on no homescreens in the sample. Linkedin is only on 11 percent. You can argue that media and commerce and job search are just starting to shift to mobile, but given the installed base on mobile today, these companies have work to do, and when the shift happens it will happen fast.