Glance, a leading lockscreen content platform owned by InMobi Group, achieved the milestone of 150 million active users in India in Q2 2021, according to Counterpoint Research’s Quarterly Mobile Application Tracker. With 151 million active users, Glance grew 8% QoQ in Q2 2021 One in every four Indian smartphone users is now active on the Glance platform, which offers an interactive lockscreen experience to Android smartphone users.

Commenting on the development, Research Analyst Arushi Chawla said, “India is a mobile-first country, with over 90% of the internet users accessing it from a smartphone. 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.”

Exhibit 1: Glance Active User Base, Q1 2021 vs Q2 2021

Source: Counterpoint Research Quarterly Mobile Application Tracker, Q2 2021

Glance, coming as a pre-installed lockscreen application, provides frictionless onboarding to new smartphone users. Besides, it continues to devise engaging ways to create stickiness to its platform:

• Glance is progressively adding a variety of engaging content, like live, interactive broadcasting.
• One of the core strategies of Glance is to support multiple regional languages. Glance eases the content discovery and absorption for a larger user base by offering eight Indian regional languages.
• With the use of ML (Machine Learning), Glance provides personalization of content across categories, including fashion, entertainment, sports, news, travel, tech, and more. Curated content and effective editorial control further make the platform clickbait-free.

The change in content consumption habit from search to discovery has made the activity more platform-driven. Therefore, the overall experience of an online content consumer now depends on content availability, quality and personalization. Glance has succeeded in matching this new trend of content discovery with its offering.

According to Counterpoint data, Glance continues to have a robust presence in the sub-$250 price band, which forms about 80% of its active user base. Further, more than one-tenth of the 5G smartphone installed base is equipped with the Glance platform, thus making it a future-ready test pad for the next phase of content innovation.

Senior Research Analyst Pavel Naiya said, “With the proliferation of 5G devices and the introduction of 5G network in India in the coming times, it will become more crucial for all hardware players to focus on content play for long-term survival. In this process, the $200-$400 price band will be the biggest segment in short- to mid-term smartphone growth. The strong presence of the Glance platform in the majority of active smartphones in this price band makes it a potential candidate for the OEMs for a long-term collaboration.”

Methodology:

Glance’s mobile application presence is calculated from our panel database of over a million smartphone active users. Model-level Glance penetration data and active user ratio were extrapolated to our monthly smartphone installed base data using various parameters such as brand, model and price band to predict Glance’s active user base. We expect the results to have a statistical precision of +/- 5% at the confidence interval of 90%.

This is a sponsored survey to better understand the brand’s presence in the Indian smartphone market.