InMobi's Glance crosses 150M active users; reaches 1 in 4 smartphone users in India

InMobi-owned lock screen content platform Glance , which became a unicorn last December, has crossed 151 million active users.

Glance hit the mark in the second quarter of 2021, growing eight percent from 140 million users in Q1 2021, according to data from Counterpoint Research. One in every four Indian smartphone users is currently active on the Glance platform.

Google-backed Glance's rise has been attributed to India's predominantly mobile-first internet population, with 90 percent of users accessing the web through their smartphones.

Arushi Chawla, Research Analyst, Counterpoint, said in a statement, “As the overall smartphone market is maturing and consolidating, with top OEMs capturing most of the market, it is also a challenge to maintain hardware differentiation when the form factors remain similar. In such a scenario, the long-term value creation will depend more on delivering differentiation through over-the-top (OTT) services. Therefore, Glance, with its presence in more than half of the current user base of the top four smartphone brands in India (Q2 2021), holds a vital role.”

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Glance comes pre-installed as a lock screen app in a majority of Android smartphones. In order to increase stickiness, it offers an array of interactive and engaging content across categories like sports, fashion, entertainment, news, travel, tech, business, and more.

According to Counterpoint Research, Glance has a "robust presence" in the sub-$250 price band of handsets, which accounts for 80 percent of its active user base.

"Further, more than one-tenth of the 5G smartphone installed base is equipped with Glance, thus making it a future-ready test pad for the next phase of content innovation," the study explained.

Glance is continually adding a variety of content in eight regional languages to penetrate deeper and wider into India's smartphone population. The platform also uses ML to personalise its content offering depending on how users react to it.

Earlier in June, Glance announced the acquisition of social commerce platform Shop101 to ramp up its mobile-led commerce offering within the lock screen and "transform the shopping experience for millions of consumers globally".

Prior to this, in 2019, Glance had also acquired short video app Roposo.

Ajay Royan, Managing General Partner & Co-founder of Mithril Capital (one of Glance's investors) said in a prior statement, "Glance, the world’s largest screen zero platform, is a powerful innovation to democratise content on the mobile internet... and breakthrough technical and linguistic barriers to deliver frictionless and engaging experiences across cultures and languages.”