Lock Screen Ads Are Coming to Some Smartphones

Right now, if you live in the United States and are familiar with lock screen ads, it’s probably coming from your e-reader, PC, or maybe even your refrigerator. Many devices with screens like to subsidize costs by serving ads, but American smartphones have been surprisingly good at keeping your lock screen clear. Until now.

“Nothing” experiences with lock screen ads

If you haven’t heard of Nothing, I don’t blame you. The Android phone company has been making waves in 2022, thanks in large part to its founder, OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei, but it has only recently started making phones on par with flagship devices like the Google Pixel or Samsung Galaxy. Above all, the brand has become known for its mid-range accessories and budget phones, which offer a lot of power for their price, but otherwise stand out with trendy, minimalist designs. It’s a smaller market, but loyal.

That’s why it’s a little strange to see the company jeopardizing its minimalism and fandom by putting ads on its lock screens, via a new “Lock Glimpse” feature.

Added in Nothing OS 4.0 late last week, when enabled, the feature will show you one of a rotating selection of wallpapers, all of which feature content linked via text at the bottom of the image. For example, a wallpaper showing a strawberry ice cream sundae may look stylish, but in practice it’s essentially an advertisement for a page with a recipe for strawberry ice cream. Don’t take my word for it: if you’re looking for a smoking gun, Reddit users have found licensing agreements linking the feature to Chinese digital advertising company BOYUAN (more on that later).

Users were unhappy, as seen on social media platforms like Not exactly a great look for a company that sells itself on its image.

To Nothing’s credit, the feature is disabled by default at the moment. But the company’s response to the backlash paints a picture that these fans might not be happy with, regardless of where they live.

“In the future, on select non-flagship devices, we will begin to include a carefully considered selection of third-party apps and services that won’t disrupt the Nothing OS experience you love,” Nothing said on its site over the weekend. Lock Glimpse has been declared as one of these services.

The reason for all this? Cost.

Nothing’s post was less than candid about the “thin margins” the company must operate on to keep pace with major players like Apple and Google, and said Lock Glimpse and “pre-installed partner apps” would be a way to continue reaching the mid-range price point it has become known for.

Worse, while the company said the feature would remain disabled by default on its current Phone (3a) model, it made no such promises regarding the upcoming Phone (3a) Lite, which will be released later this week, and is the “first entry-level smartphone with Nothing’s signature transparent design.”

Although Nothing has stated its intention to give users “full control over features like Lock Glimpse” in the future, it’s not hard to imagine a future in which the feature is enabled by default and pre-installed alongside apps that the owner didn’t request, even on global versions.

Nothing’s lock screen ads matter, even if you don’t own a Nothing phone

Again, Nothing is not the first smartphone brand to serve lock screen ads. Other low- to mid-budget phone companies are doing this as well, including Motorola with a feature called Glance and OnePlus with a feature called Lock Screen Magazine. But Nothing’s decision to join the herd points to a potential sea change, both in terms of manufacturing and distribution.

First, Nothing focuses not so much on the hardware as on the experience. Even its most powerful phone currently uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s chip, which is a weaker version of the Snapdragon 8 line you’ll find in phones like the Samsung Galaxy series. The selling point therefore lies in software like Nothing OS, which the company presents as “clean”, “beautifully functional” and “attentive”.

Lock screen ads don’t fit that vision, at least for me, and the fact that Nothing felt compelled to include them means it’s willing to risk its biggest differentiator to increase revenue. In my opinion, it’s a canary in the coal mine for the pressures currently facing any smartphone company that isn’t big enough to absorb development costs. Nothing tends to be quite direct in its communication, so I’ve asked for more information and will update this post if I hear back, but it’s not 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 now, they’ve only recently started making their way to the US via test launches, and Nothing’s implementation makes them available to anyone with an affected phone, regardless of region, and breaks promises previously made by the company behind most of these ads.

It turns out that BOYAUN, the company behind Nothing’s Lock Glimpse feature, also powers Glance and Lock Screen Magazine. And while Glance previously told Android Police that he doesn’t plan to introduce lock screen ads in the US as is the case in regions like India, but rather charge users a “subscription fee to access premium news on their lock screen”, here they are.

I try to avoid speculation when I can, but taken together, these two facts mean it’s very possible that other low- and mid-budget phones will follow Nothing’s lead in the future. Lock screen ads have been pretty bad overseas, but it’s something that US users may now have to get used to.

The glimmer of hope

That said, while lock screen ads are something to be prepared for, they aren’t necessarily going to ruin your phone. They’ll just make the setup more boring.

I believe Nothing when it says that it will give users control of Lock Glimpse, largely because even Glance and Lock Screen Magazine can be disabled. The latter two being much less image-driven companies than Nothing, it would be strange to see Nothing break its promise here if that’s not the case. The same goes for Nothing saying that pre-installed apps will be “easy to remove”.

However, any additional steps you require of a user means that more people will simply accept the default. Don’t be surprised if, once phones start showing lock screen ads out-of-the-box, you see your less tech-savvy friends end up using them without even knowing that’s the case.

That’s why it’s still an issue, and why it’s reassuring that, at least in Nothing’s case, Lock Glimpse is only available on select phones (again, Nothing’s blog says flagship models will be spared). Since this brand is already a bit specialized, it probably won’t be the company to standardize ads on lock screens, especially because the cheaper models that are more likely to get Lock Glimpse have limited carrier support in the United States.

Still, Nothing phones with Lock Glimpse are technically available here, and this may be the first time some Americans have seen lock screen ads. Plus, they’re also exposed to the same market pressures as all their competitors, meaning this probably isn’t the last we’ll see of them either. In the United States, lock screen ads are no longer a question of “if.” Just “when”.