Apps and advertisers are officially coming for our lock screens

Already downloaded to roughly 400m phones around Asia, this perpetually running stream of content reportedly grabs the attention of its consumers on average 65 times a day. Bear in mind, that’s without a real widespread rollout of the tech. Sounds healthy, eh?

In June, Glance held a virtual three-day festival that took place entirely on its users’ lock screens. It streamed gigs, interactive challenges, interviews, and a ridiculous amount of live ecommerce content to more than 70m people.

It goes without saying then that there’s serious market potential here, and both companies and advertisers are all over it. Generally speaking, most users don’t change their phone’s default settings and developers will use that to their advantage.

If you don’t want to take my word for it, though, here are the words of InMobi CEO Naveen Tewari on the day of Glance’s 2019 launch: ‘Consumers will move from seeking content to consuming what is shown to them.’

Daunting as it all sounds, we’d better get with the program quickly – considering both Glance’s US rollout and Apple iOS16 are slated for September.

In all seriousness though, knowing a thing or two about Big Tech and people in general, it doesn’t feel as though enough mutual trust has been built to ensure that lock screen content takes off without upsetting large groups.

For those who aren’t just about increased convenience with technology, this tech may feel too intrusive. Like handing over what little control of our devices we have left to corporations, and in a time where we’re trying to be more considered with our screen time.

Apple claims that lock screen content will somehow make us less distracted by our phones on a day-to-day basis, but the idea of waking up to offers for headphones, or cut price train tickets (for me) seems like a step too far. Either way, it’s on the way.

We expect there will be a lot more to cover on this subject soon, so stay tuned.