Advertisement
Glance is an app that allows you to lock your screen. It’s not like any other lock screen software, though. Instead of showing you monotonous themes and wallpapers, it will provide you with new stuff.
A short movie, a news piece, or even a fast game (after it acquired short-video app Roposo). You can swipe through the story/video to locate something that strikes your interest, and when you click on it, an embedded browser opens to show you the entire story/video.
So, instead of a quick interaction with your lock screen, you now have a minute lock engagement where you’re consuming content on screen zero without even unlocking your phone.
Glance claims that consumers spend an average of 25 minutes each day on its content screens. You could have spent all that time on other apps like Instagram. And you can understand why this appears to be a million-dollar possibility right away.
Advertisement
But it isn’t the case. This is a multibillion-dollar opportunity. And you’ll have to look at the company’s acquisition strategy to figure out why.
You won’t be able to find Glance on the Playstore anymore. In reality, it isn’t even an app. It’s a service. Most Android phones have this capability. Glance sought to recruit consumers the traditional method when it first began in 2016. Create an app, market it on Google Play, and get others to download it. However, by 2019, it had given up on the plan. Perhaps after realising how difficult it can be to compete for instals in a saturated market. Around the same time, Google published guidelines for lock screen apps that serve advertisements. So perhaps this tiny change has sped up the process.
Glance said farewell to Google and went straight to the manufacturers. Consider Samsung and Xiaomi, for example. It requested that they include Glance as a pre-installed feature on their handsets, particularly in the $250 price range, which accounts for around 80% of sales in India. Glance most likely promised to reimburse the manufacturers handsomely in exchange. Throughout it all, the iconic lock screen became a standard feature on most Android phones, and the firm amassed 200 million Daily Active Users.
Reliance wants to get its new phones into the hands of as many Indians as possible, and Glance will almost certainly be prominent on those phones, which explains why Reliance invested $200 million.
Reliance also appears to be planning to push its retail products directly to the 200 million daily active users we mentioned before via Glance, according to reports.