Look that provides media content, news, and casual games on Android's lock screen -operated smartphones have amassed 100 million active users every day, it said today.
The subsidiary of the advertising agency InMobi Naveen Tewari, founder and managing director of InMobi Group, said in an interview with theinformationsuperhighway the milestone in 21 months in what appears to be the shortest time a popular internet service needs to gain its first 100 million active users per day.
Glance uses AI to give its users a personalized experience. The service replaces the otherwise blank lock screen with locally relevant news, stories, and casual games. At the end of last year, InMobi acquired Roposo, a startup headquartered in Gurgaon that enabled him to introduce short videos on the platform.
“The introduction of short videos and games on Glance helped us increase engagement. About 25% of our users actively play games at a glance, ”said Tewari. The company is now working on making these short videos available in many national languages. (You can also test the service in your mobile web browser.)
Glance not only offers an independent app in the Google Play Store, but is also preinstalled on several smartphone models. InMobi maintains connections with almost all leading Android smartphone vendors, including Xiaomi. Samsung, Oppo, Vivo and LG.
However, according to Tewari, users can easily disable the service. The 100 million users the company reports today are the ones who deliberately deal with content on Glance. Users spend about 25 minutes each day consuming content on Glance, he said.
By sitting on the lock screen, perhaps the most desirable property on a smartphone, to reach a user, Glance was able to send information to a very large number of users in a short period of time. According to Tewari, more than 40 million users responded to Glance, for example by telling them about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's speech last month about the country's closure.
“We are not just a short-form video platform. We are not just a gaming platform or a platform that only delivers news. When you consider where we are sitting, we take care of almost everything in the world. So everyone has something to consume, ”he said.
The service is currently available in India, the largest market with more than 80 million users, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. Tewari said the company plans to launch Glance worldwide in the next two years.
Glance, which raised $ 45 million last year, is not currently monetizing its users. Tewari said he experimented with a few ideas but would not put pressure on this front for a quarter or two.
