Lock-screen ads are the Indian smartphone default. A clean phone is a premium product now.

The story that most clearly makes the point this year is Nothing. The British brand built its name on soft minimalism — monochrome icons, a stripped UI, clean type — and used it to charge roughly ₹5,000 more than a comparable Xiaomi for a specced-identical phone. In October 2025, Nothing OS 3.5 shipped with a feature called Lock Glimpse — a rotating lock-screen inventory of sponsored content from a Chinese ad-tech partner — plus a preloaded Facebook that could not be fully uninstalled. By January 2026 the backlash forced a partial walkback: Lock Glimpse would now be off by default, and the preinstalled bloat would be uninstallable, at least partially. Neither change restored the thing Nothing had been selling, which was the absence of either.

What makes the Nothing episode a Known Issue instead of a one-brand failure is that it was the mid-tier catching up with the bottom tier. The bottom tier has shipped lock-screen ads for years. Glance, an InMobi subsidiary, invented the category on Jio Phones in 2019 and became default on much of the Xiaomi, Realme and Vivo ₹8,000–₹18,000 line through the 2020s. MIUI (now HyperOS) ads sit in system apps — Mi Browser, Mi Music, Downloads, Themes, Settings search — and have for the better part of a decade. Xiaomi’s 2026 moves have tightened the trend further: the company announced a global preloaded crypto wallet in partnership with Sei Labs on about 160 million units, and while that specific app is not shipping in India under current law, the stack it rides on is.

The structural reason is tight. Panel margins, chip prices and inventory financing push Indian OEMs to price at near-cost on everything up to about ₹25,000. Software monetisation — preload fees from Glance and others, in-app ad surfaces, system-app ad surfaces, carrier-and-OEM bloatware agreements — pays the margin. Public per-unit numbers are not disclosed by the brands, but industry trade estimates place the preload stack at a few hundred rupees per phone, which on a ₹14,000 Redmi is the difference between a profitable sale and a flat one.

The regulatory counterweight died quietly. In 2023, India drafted a MeitY rule that would have required brands to make preinstalled apps user-removable and to put major OS updates through a screening process. Reuters covered the drafting. The rule never issued. Industry pushback flagged launch delays and preload-economy risk to foreign manufacturing. The lobbying worked. Three years on, there is no national bloatware regulation in India, and the preload stack has grown rather than shrunk.

The settings maze is real. Disabling Glance requires an opt-out inside the lock-screen settings that moves location between OS versions; disabling MIUI’s “recommendations” means visiting each system app and finding its separate ad toggle; disabling Nothing’s Lock Glimpse means turning off a feature introduced in the exact release that also hid the toggle lower in the menu. Any of these can be done once by anybody with half an hour and some patience. None of them survives a factory reset or a major OS version jump cleanly.

The honest list of what to buy in India today if a clean device is what you want is short. Pixel 9a sits at around ₹52,000 with stock Android and the full seven-year update window — see the Pixel update roulette piece for the caveat that comes with that. Motorola Edge 60 Fusion and the Edge base variants ship near-stock at around ₹28,000–₹32,000. iPhone SE 2026 and iPhone 16e sit at ₹45,000–₹60,000 with zero preload surface. Below ₹25,000 there is currently no phone sold in India that is both specced competitively and clean.

The gap is real and the gap is the known issue. The sub-₹20,000 phone is not expensive because of its hardware; it is expensive because of what it hands over. If a clean device is what you want, that costs more now, and will continue to cost more as long as the margin structure holds.