Lock Screen Ads Will Appear on Some Smartphones.
If you live in the US and are familiar with lock screen ads, they likely appear on your e-reader , computer , or even your refrigerator . Many devices with screens try to cut costs by displaying ads, but American smartphones do a surprisingly good job of keeping their lock screens clean. Until now.
Experimenting with ads on the “Nothing” lock screen
If you haven’t heard of Nothing, I don’t blame you. This Android phone company made a splash back in 2022, thanks in large part to its founder, OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei, but only recently began producing phones comparable to flagships like the Google Pixel or Samsung Galaxy . The brand is primarily known for its mid-range accessories and budget phones, which offer solid performance for their price but otherwise stand out for their fashionable, minimalist designs. It’s a small but loyal market.
That’s why it’s a little strange to see a company compromising both its minimalism and its fandom by placing ads on lock screens with its new “Lock Glimpse” feature.
This feature, added to Nothing OS 4.0 late last week, will, when enabled, display a rotating selection of wallpapers, all of which contain a text link at the bottom of the image. For example, a strawberry ice cream wallpaper might look stylish, but in practice, it’s essentially an ad for a strawberry ice cream recipe page. Don’t take my word for it—if you’re looking for hard evidence, Reddit users have found permission agreements linking this feature to the Chinese digital advertising company BOYUAN (more on that later).
Users were dissatisfied, which was evident on platforms like X , where some threatened to install their own operating systems on their phones instead of Nothing’s proprietary one, while others compared the move to similar “features” from OnePlus and Motorola , which are largely unimplemented in the US. Not a good look for a company that sells itself on image.
To Nothing’s credit, this feature is currently disabled by default. But the company’s response to the backlash creates the impression that fans can be dissatisfied no matter where they live.
“Going forward, on select non-flagship devices, we’ll begin including a carefully curated set of third-party apps and services that won’t interfere with your favorite Nothing OS experience,” Nothing wrote on its website last weekend. Lock Glimpse was listed as one of these services.
The reason for all this? Price.
In its post, Nothing openly discussed the “razor-thin margins” the company must operate on to keep up with big players like Apple and Google, and suggested that both Lock Glimpse and “pre-installed partner apps” would be a way to continue maintaining the mid-range price point for which it has become known.
Worse, while the company said the feature would still be disabled by default on its current Phone (3a) model, it made no promises about the upcoming Phone (3a) Lite, which will launch later this week and be “the first entry-level smartphone to feature Nothing’s signature transparent design.”
While Nothing has stated that it intends to give users “full control over features like Lock Glimpse” in the future, it’s not hard to imagine a future where the feature is enabled by default and pre-installed alongside apps the owner hasn’t requested, even on global versions.
Nothing lock screen ads don’t matter even if you don’t have a Nothing phone
Again, Nothing isn’t the first smartphone brand to place ads on the lock screen. Other companies producing budget and mid-range smartphones are doing so as well—most notably Motorola with its Glance feature and OnePlus with its Lock Screen Magazine feature. But Nothing’s decision to join them points to potential dramatic changes, both in terms of production and distribution.
First, Nothing focuses less on hardware and more on user experience. Even its most powerful smartphone currently uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s chip, a downgraded version of the Snapdragon 8 series used in smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy. Therefore, its main selling point is software, such as Nothing OS , which the company markets as “clean,” “beautifully functional,” and “thoughtful.”
Lock screen ads don’t fit this vision, at least in my opinion, and the fact that Nothing felt the need to include them suggests the company is willing to risk its primary differentiator for the sake of increased profits. In my view, this is a canary in the coal mine for the pressures currently facing any smartphone company that isn’t large enough to cover its development costs. Nothing is typically quite straightforward in its communications, so I’ve reached out for more information and will update this post if I hear back, but this isn’t a good sign for the industry as a whole.
Which brings me to my second point: while lock screen ads from Motorola and OnePlus have been around for a while, they only recently started appearing in the US in test runs , and Nothing’s implementation makes them available to all owners of affected phones, regardless of region, and breaks promises the company behind most of these ads made previously.
As it turns out, BOYAUN, the company behind Nothing’s Lock Glimpse feature, also powers Glance and Lock Screen Magazine. And while Glance previously told Android Police that it doesn’t plan to introduce lock screen ads in the US, as it did in regions like India, but will instead charge users a “subscription for access to premium news on the lock screen,” here it is.
I try to avoid speculation whenever possible, but taken together, these two facts mean that other budget and mid-range phones will likely follow the Nothing’s example in the future. Lock screen ads were already a nuisance abroad, but now American users may have to get used to them.
Silver lining
However, while lock screen ads are a good thing to be prepared for, they won’t necessarily ruin your phone. They’ll just make it more difficult to set up.
I believe Nothing when they claim they’ll give users control over Lock Glimpse, mainly because even Glance and Lock Screen Magazine can be disabled. The latter two companies are far less image-conscious than Nothing, so it would be strange if Nothing broke their promise if they didn’t. The same goes for Nothing, which claims pre-installed apps will be “easily uninstallable.”
However, any additional actions you require from users will lead to more people simply accepting the default settings. Don’t be surprised if, as more phones start showing lock screen ads out of the box, your less tech-savvy friends start using them without even realizing it.
That’s why this issue still persists, and why it’s encouraging that, at least in the case of Nothing, Lock Glimpse will only appear on certain phones (again, Nothing’s blog post states that flagship models will remain unchanged). Given that the brand is already quite niche, the company is unlikely to become the standard for lock screen advertising, especially since the cheaper models that are more likely to receive Lock Glimpse have limited carrier support in the US .
However, Nothing phones with Lock Glimpse are technically available here, so some Americans may see lock screen ads there. Furthermore, they’re subject to the same market pressures as all their competitors, meaning this likely won’t be the last we see them. Lock screen ads in the US are no longer a matter of “if.” It’s only a matter of “when.”