<center>![](https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2016/12/24/01/24/accounting-1928237_960_720.png)</center>

All our writings are stored on the Steem blockchain. Most people are aware of this but don't fully understand what that means. To put it as simple as possible our data is stored in a database of which copies are maintained in many different locations. No-one really owns the database, it is decentralized. This also means that if the most popular Steem blockchain interface, steemit.com, would cease to exist the data is not lost.

The fact is that steemit.com is the most popular Steem blockchain interface but it is definitely not the only one. There are quite a few alternatives available. These names might ring a bell: esteem, busy, utopian, steepshot, dtube, zappl, chainbb, ... Because they are just interfaces it also means that you can use them interchangeably. That is to some extend of course. 

Last week I was having a discussion and one of the points required a better understanding of which front-ends are most used and their market share. I took the time to make this analysis based on the data available in SteemSQL. The query used:

    select JSON_VALUE(json_metadata,'$.app') AS APPLICATION, COUNT(*) AS 'num' from dbo.Comments
    where (ISJSON(json_metadata) > 0) AND created >= DATEADD(DAY,-30,GETDATE())
    group by JSON_VALUE(json_metadata,'$.app')
    order by 'num'

These results are based on the last 30 days and make use of the app field in the json data of both posts and comments. As expected it is obvious steemit.com is the most popular one. There are a total of no less than 169 different entries. This does not mean there are 169 different applications used. Busy and esteem for example are found in the top with different version numbers. This is an overview of all applications that have more than a 0.5% share. 

<center>![Capture.PNG](https://res.cloudinary.com/hpiynhbhq/image/upload/v1515424735/waq2g5rnobvwzmtcotc7.png)
 </center>

I reworked those and took together the different versions:

<center> ![Capture2.PNG](https://res.cloudinary.com/hpiynhbhq/image/upload/v1515424744/ns7f3v3pz5xldgbyskgg.png)
 </center>

There are some special cases here: '\N' means the value was not filled in. And we can deduct some presumably bot entries as well: postpromotor, pysteem, drotto, steemjs and cosgrove.

A picture is worth a thousand words so I made this pie chart:
<center>![Capture3.PNG](https://res.cloudinary.com/hpiynhbhq/image/upload/v1515424755/nvbsjyt5zeyklg4qm0ki.png)
 </center>

It's obvious steemit is still king. To get a better view of everything but steemit I made an extra analysis. This time I included everything that has a share over 0.1% and added all versions together for a better overview. Doing this result in this table:

<center>![Capture4.PNG](https://res.cloudinary.com/hpiynhbhq/image/upload/v1515424765/z7slr9bjlu8qiyqxc9ch.png)
 </center> 

And again in chart form:
<center>![Capture5.PNG](https://res.cloudinary.com/hpiynhbhq/image/upload/v1515424774/lnfsjjq9bcity8rzoro0.png)
 </center> 

It's obvious that we see more bots here. Going below 0.1% just adds more bots and was beyond the scope of what I was interested in. The only ones that I recognized were zappl and chainbb.

As for user front-ends it's obvious. Steemit.com is king by a very big margin. Next we have esteem, busy, steemkr and our beloved Utopian. It's noteworthy that Utopian, which started as a fork of busy, is almost half as big as busy. Impressive!

*Header image source: pixabay.com*

<br /><hr/><em>Posted on <a href="https://utopian.io/utopian-io/@jefpatat/these-are-the-steem-blockchain-most-popular-frontends">Utopian.io -  Rewarding Open Source Contributors</a></em><hr/>