A Zero Screen Game

With Glance, InMobi wants to rule Android’s screens

It’s not an app. It can’t be downloaded. It can’t be rated. It has no ads

Rohin Dharmakumar, 28 Mar 2019

InMobi is betting the house on Glance, its lockscreen service with 26 million daily users from India

That places it in the striking territory of Instagram, Twitter and TikTok

Sidestepping Google, Glance relies exclusively on OEM partners like Samsung, Xiaomi and Vivo to reach users

Its goal is to become a daily destination for monetisable high-quality, short-form content

For two years running now, India has been the centre of the Android app ecosystem. Lured by data plans and smartphones that keep getting cheaper, hundreds of millions of Indians, many online for the first time, are glued to their screens.

In 2018, Indians downloaded around 18 billion Android apps from Google’s Play Store, according to app analytics firm App Annie’s The State of Mobile 2019 report, up 165% over a two-year period. It’s not slowing down anytime soon either, with the current 430 million smartphone users making up less than 40% of the total number of mobile subscribers in the country.

AUTHOR

Rohin Dharmakumar

Rohin is co-founder and CEO at The Ken. He holds an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta and an engineering degree in Computer Sciences from the R.V.C.E., Bangalore.

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With Glance, InMobi wants to rule Android’s screens