Google And Glance Are Looking To Monetize Your Lock Screen

There’s No Place Like Home … For Ads

Glance is a subsidiary of a huge Indian advertising company called InMobi who focuses on mobile ads.  They have massive market penetration in the Android market in Asia, somewhat of a presence in the EU and are now setting their sights on North America thanks to backing from Google.  Our market will be somewhat different for them, as they have tended to work with the phone manufacturers overseas.  In NA it is the carriers that control the market and that is exactly who Glance is targeting.

In the next few months you may start to see their software installed on new phones out of the package, which suggests it may not be removeable.  The reason you should be concerned is how Glance’s software works.  It pops up notifications on your lock screen of various news feeds and also tries to get you to swipe them to move them out of the way.  The moment you interact with any of their notifications their software will take over your home screen.

From that point you will be served full screen ads until you manually change your home screen back to your preferred picture.  We can hope that Glance will tone down their campaigns in NA, but part of the onus is on us to reduce the profitability of advertising on our phone’s lockscreens, so be alert.