How ads could soon be coming to your smartphone’s lock screen

Your smartphone’s lock screen could soon feature ads. Glance, an Indian company specializing in mobile ads, plans to launch its services on Android smartphones in the United States in the coming months.

Ads on your smartphone’s locked screen? The idea has already caught on and could be coming to our devices much sooner than we think.

Glance, a subsidiary of India’s InMobi Group, is a service already present on about 400 million smartphones in Asia, principally Android devices manufactured by Samsung, Vivo, Xiaomi or Oppo. Its concept is to display advertising content on the lock screen of these phones. Glance can offer games, news articles, videos, travel information and obviously sponsored media content. In fact, just about any content could fit on the lock screen.

According to the subsidiary, 200 million users have “interacted” with its service in India. Building on this success, the company is now targeting the US market with a more high-end offering. But while Glance works closely with smartphone manufacturers in Asia, the strategy appears to be different in the United States.

Here, Glance will need to get closer to mobile network operators, through which most cell phones are sold with price plans. Valued at $2 billion, the company already has partnerships with Samsung, Motorola, Xiaomi and is backed by the tech giant Google.

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There is no certainty yet on how the feature could be integrated into smartphones. It remains likely that users will have the possibility to disable the option quickly. However, the feature could be enabled by default, offering a way for the company to make a tidy profit by betting on the inability of less tech-savvy users to disable the option.

Everything remains to be defined, both with mobile operators and manufacturers. In August 2021, Samsung rowed back from a similar move after numerous complaints from consumers when the firm displayed ads in its One UI.

For now, Glance’s service seems only to concern Android smartphones. But Apple, via the next version iOS 16, is also moving towards revamping lock screens by offering new ways to customize them. Will this be an opportunity for the American firm to offer ads?

For the moment, at least, this does not seem to be the main focus of the project. Nevertheless, it looks like our smartphone lock screens are going to undergo quite a facelift in the coming months…

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