While it’s true that the Android lock screen might need a bit of animation since Apple revealed what it’s doing for iOS, that’s not what we were thinking. According to TechCrunch, the mobile ad company, Glance, plans to launch its lock screen platform on Android devices in the US in the next two months.
According to the report, Glance has been in talks with U.S. wireless carriers and plans to launch several smartphones as soon as next month. The TechCrunch source is a person “acquainted with the matter” who asked for anonymity as “deliberations are ongoing and private.”
Glance did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment and we will update this post when we have a response.
Glance is a subsidiary of InMobi, a mobile marketing platform based in India. It has become known as India’s first unicorn startup due to its fundraising success. He even managed to secure Google as an investor a few years ago.
Glance comes pre-installed on a large number of overseas Android devices, including Samsung’s budget line of smartphones. It’s not an Android app in the traditional sense, meaning you can go into the Google Play Store and download it. Instead, it rests on top of the Android operating system as a kind of overlay. Glance is also an important part of the Pragati operating system, a custom version of Android developed between Google and Jio for affordable smartphones like the Jio Phone Next.
Glance exists primarily as a dynamic lock screen. Once you turn on your phone screen, you’ll see updated content, such as a different wallpaper, news headlines, and video. But it also shows ads, and while they don’t sound on the screen like yesterday’s Internet pop-up ads, they’re annoying enough that you can quickly show the message board threads of users trying to disable the ability. While searching for this story, I even came across this Realme India support account on Twitter to apologize for the lack of ability to disable Glance altogether.
While you can unlock your phone to avoid content, Glance is programmed to allow you to keep scrolling to interact with different dashboards with content you really want, such as original news and videos. Beyond its captive audience approach, the company seems to believe it has potential with a model of “excite you to stay a while”. Earlier this year, Glance launched an Android TV experience for Indian customers, promising users the ability to “interact directly in real time with their favorite stars on their TV’s home screens.”
Despite the perceived success in other parts of the world, it is troubling that Glance is looking to the United States. Users of low- and mid-range devices already have the short end of the pen when buying a smartphone through an operator. The phone models that are offered tend to be underperforming and delay essential software updates. Imagine dealing with all of this in addition to bloatware ads and unsolicited content that you can’t unblock or disable.
Nothing has been officially announced by Glance, but the existence of advertising on Android smartphones has become a genuine concern in recent years. To offer an anecdote, I’ve been using the OnePlus 9 since last summer, and the company’s official app constantly pushes promotions and stuff like that into the shadow of notifications. The same thing happened on some Samsung devices, which featured advertising that appeared on all of the company’s stock apps, including Samsung Health and Galaxy Store. Fortunately, there is a solution in Android 13 that blocks all unwanted pings in the drop-down notification shadow at the time you install an app, but that doesn’t fix the main problem.
If more companies find that users are willing to tolerate these types of forced ads, it could hurt the already torn reputation of the Android platform. This could mean good news for Apple, which has managed to maintain parity in iOS between the “cheaper” models of the iPhone and its latest canopy units while gaining market share. Google is primarily engaged in the advertising business, and the Android platform deals, at least in part, with data collection that fuels ad targeting. Encouraging users to invest in an Apple phone that isn’t full of bloatware could be something of its own that you don’t really need.