Wow LineageOS really is a bazaar, and not a cathedral.
* 74% of installs are unofficial builds, not ones released by LineageOS.
* 2/3 of US installs are on non-phones (waydroid, nintendo switch, rpi, etc)
* Most of the installs on actual phones are in China, Brazil and Vietnam
* Less than 21% of installs are on versions that receive security updates, and less than 9% of installs are on the latest version (mostly because device's binary blobs don't support newer android versions?)
> * 74% of installs are unofficial builds, not ones released by LineageOS.
Every time I want to install LineageOS on a device because it's been abandoned by the manufacturer, it's also been abandoned by LineageOS, leaving me with some random custom rom as only option.
It is a great OS. It needs to be available on newer Motorolas, say 2024 and onward. People want SD card slots, and even 3.5mm headphone jacks. It is the memory card slot that matters most.
It is great to have a degoogled phone. Then the lack of a card slot annoys you and the desire to just plug in an aux cable and have sound anywhere without a dongle comes to the fore.
I wish they would just commit to also support the Motorola G Stylus line. The G Stylus 2024 was a great phone.
>> 74% of installs are unofficial builds, not ones released by LineageOS.
One of the first versions of LineageOS I used was Evolution X on my Moms old OnePlus phone since it wasn't supported by the "official" Lineage version. Great track record of almost daily updates, and the customization you could do with it was phenomenal. The funny thing was I was running Ubuntu Touch on it before and it was super sluggish (totally not expecting that tbh) so switched to Evolution and suddenly the same phone was really snappy and the battery lasted for almost two days.
But yeah, I'm not surprised many installs are just branched versions of the original since many of them you can run on phones that aren't supported by the official version.
the LineageOS teams refuses to incorporate patches to support MicroG as a replacement for Google Services so anyone (including me) that wants to follow that path is required to use unofficial builds.
They stopped that malpractice a while ago (last year?). Signature spoofing is now possible, so microG should work.
But they really hurt their credibility with the prior stance, and that their subreddit still has rules forbidding almost all discussions - interpreted as just closing all questions regarding blocked topics, like rooting, microG, Volte - is still a stain on an otherwise great project.
> They stopped that malpractice a while ago (last year?).
By now it has actually been almost two and a half years.
> But they really hurt their credibility with the prior stance, and that their subreddit still has rules forbidding almost all discussions [...].
While I'm not looking to turn this into an off-platform meta discussion, pretty much all of those rules have their very good reasons to be there.
As an example, you would be surprised how many people install a Magisk module to strip away LineageOS-specific build version properties, and then end up in our support platforms asking why the Updater can't search for new updates (of course while not mentioning that they have modified their system).
microG I don't even see listed as a part of any rule anymore, it was removed when upstream support for microG was merged.
You are correct, the microG ban is gone from the sidebar. That's nice.
(Why this was so important: During covid the official contact tracker in Germany needed microG/the play services, a newer alternative than bundled the scanner or something, so worked without. When it becomes life and death impractical positions like that hurt).
It's okay if you dont want to discuss it. To share my position anyway: You need the option to have root so the device belongs you (and not the Rom), VoLTE is an existential threat and the ban stiffles all options to easily get information about the situation. That's the main point: Banning topics completely does only make things worse, and it is not like the project tried not to ban these topics for how many years now, a decade? An Autobot answer should suffice for making the problems known.
If you are talking about the addition of microG, that indeed seems like it hasn't been mentioned on the blog, although I'd argue very likely due to an oversight.
I can find internal conversations that it deserves to be announced in a more prominent way than on the "Sunsetting LineageOS 18.1" post, was left as "to be added to the LineageOS 22.x" blog post, and then just never made the initial draft. Whoops.
If you are talking about the rules on the subreddit (or the other social platforms), that one indeed has been discussed a lot on the platform itself (and which we usually keep available).
i'm not sure all those "installs on actual phones" in china are real - 107k installs all on the same device, vs ~30k installs on the next most popular device. and 150k devices on an unknown carrier. is the Xiaomi Mi 8 really that popular for lineageOS, or is this some measurement artifact or common emulation setup?
Mi 8 has a very good camera and battery life I am guessing it could be used as live streaming phone in china so still useful despite being an older device
Given how uncommon x86 phones are (a few asus, lenovo, etc. that did not sell well) I think it's clear the vast majority of waydroid_x86_64 are not phones, right?
Searching for "waydroid_x86_64 LineageOS 20.0" leads to a sourceforge page [0] of waydroid with LineageOS builds that have 70-80k downloads per month.
It seems to be popular to be installed on CachyOS, which in turn is the 2nd most popular distro to use Steam (after SteamOS itself), so my guess is that it's a popular setup for gaming...
Exactly why I stopped installing LineageOS on my phone.
While part of it was that I was no longer interested in tinkering with ROM and playing cat-and-mouse game with SafetyNet/root detection/whatever, the other part is that I cannot trust these ROMs, some of which come (or came) with their own bloatware. Those that have official builds are of course better, but the overall experience and security situation is still much worse than OEM ROM, despite all the junk there.
P.S. another issue is that I became sick of is devs using xda forum as the only communication channel, including bug reports, updates etc. GitHub has existed for over a decade, and the issue tracker/release system is usable, yet they choose the worst way to do software engineering.
Agreed, the xda forum thing is a huge security smell. "Here, download this big binary from a random forum user and put it on a device you carry with you everywhere which is equipped with internet, camera, microphone, and GPS. You're welcome!"
The GrapheneOS setup seems a lot better (though it has more limited support).
It's quite sad to see these stats. It used to be the defacto standard for custom ROMs. These dwindling numbers make me think either people aren't as interested in custom ROMs anymore and using the (bloated/Google) factory ROMs or maybe there's some new standard.
Didn't these numbers used to be much, much higher in the past?
NB: Since I'm on GrapheneOS now I haven't looked back
Nowadays most devices can't be bootloader unlocked at all (see Huawei/BBK(Oppo,Vivo) in China) or can but with difficulties and, in some cases, little to no driver support (see Xiaomi or even Samsung's unlock procedures too, difficult to deal with from experience). So developers cannot develop ROMs as they cannot get on the phones anyway.
This is partly done, I think, to prevent users from uninstalling bloatware (Chinese brands doing this mostly), since I've had to deal with this on a BBK branded phone, locked down so far even ADB can't touch the bloat.
Google is also a part of this with play integrity and apps being blocked from working, so if you depend on Google or if you want to use that phone in your day-to-day life with apps from work or banking apps, it might not work great on the same phone.
In my opinion I think it is mostly the manufacturers fighting this, Google is solvable but a locked bootloader isn't.
- Spoofing SafetyNet used to be trivial, and not many apps depended on it; whereas these days, it's between hard and impossible to spoof Play Integrity, and it feels like much more apps depend on it. (At least, that's why I stopped rooting my phone.)
- If you want a non-bloated, mostly-AOSP ROM with updates for many years, installing LineageOS (or another third-party ROM) used to be the only option; whereas these days, the Pixel phones give you most of this, and you can just buy these in a store instead of needing to manually flash a ROM.
- The stock ROMs from most manufacturers are less horrible than they used to be. I'm not saying that they're great now, but there's a pretty huge difference between most new phones today and a KitKat-era cheap Samsung phone.
- As you said, I suspect that GrapheneOS has supplanted LineageOS for many of the enthusiast users.
I believe a lot of the enthusiasm we had at the start of the smartphone age is also now gone. The phone is now a boring device made for scrolling and running apps that are mandatory to participate in modern society.
> running apps that are mandatory to participate in modern society
This right here is why I no longer consider custom ROMs. My phone is a tool critical to my daily life and I need it to function correctly nearly 100% of the time. Custom ROMs never really reach that bar in my experience.
Also, the various forms of attestation allow corporations the power to punish me for having the temerity to modify my own property. Yet another way the tech industry has metastasized into a societal cancer.
> NB: Since I'm on GrapheneOS now I haven't looked back
Not to suggest GrapheneOS has become the new "standard" given it currently only supports Pixels, but I hear a lot more about GrapheneOS as the custom Android build than LineageOS, so I wonder if a lot of people have moved there from LineageOS.
The other reason for a decline in custom ROMs may just be that apps are becoming more and more locked down. Banking apps are getting stricter all the time, so even the ones that work with custom ROMs today aren't guaranteed to work tomorrow. And more people probably use Google Wallet than ever, which also rules out custom ROMs AFAIK.
About 250k devices were getting GrapheneOS security updates two years ago[1], so it is approaching the number of official (and opt-in reported) installs of LineageOS.
I agree on the locked down part. Ever since I bought my first smartphone (HTC Desire) I've been flashing custom ROMs pretty much the day I bought it. In the beginning it was a hastle, then it became much easier. In 2021 and 2023 I bought a Xiaomi and it required registering before bootloader unlock was allowed. I didn't like I had to register, but did it anyway.
The real problem for me were the hard to come by blobs that needed flashing after certain updates. And the fact no official supported LineageOS build as available. That last one is mostly on my part for not checking before buying. But still, in the past pretty much any popular phone had one or more official builds supported on XDA. Nowadays you need to venture into Telegram groups scrolling over endless linear conversations of people asking the same issue over and over again. Maybe I'm just getting old, but what was wrong with using a (well structured) forum?
For me, I'm not that concerned with having contactless payments work. Although I did switch banks just to not have the Google Services/wallet requirement. That was short lived though, pretty much every contactless payment now only works with Google Wallet (ridiculous), I just gave up on it and pay by card instead.
I just want to get away from the fact Google Services is integrated into everything you do on your phone. The fact Google Wallet has access to not only the payments you make using NFC, but also the last x transactions on you bank account 'for fraud detection purposes' is quite insane if you ask me.
That's why I just run plain without Google Services (not even the sandboxed one by GrapheneOS) and accept the fact certain conveniences just isn't available for me.
I don't even miss rooting, which I mostly did in the past to have (non VPN based) add blocking on OS level. I just replaced most apps by their browser-based alterantives and use an add blocker there.
a significant contribution is due to android companies not allowing bootloader to be unlocked and then not providing kernel sources, making any development very hard, and many times impossible.
From what I understand, my phone's 4G won't work with lineage os and either of the two cell providers that have reception in my area so it's basically unusable for me. I would like to use it but I effectively can't.
Now that manufacturers support their devices for 5+ years and ROMs are actually quite usable out of the box, the need for custom ROMs is much lower. Plus, some convenience apps require things like remote attestation, getting in the way of users. I suspect a significant chunk of the serious ROM user base is also lost to GrapheneOS these days.
Even Samsung is fine with a quick debloating session you can do through WebUSB these days. The only phones I'd really need a custom ROM on these days are those certain Chinese brands that stuff their phone with absolute garbage. Compared to the days where a custom ROM would be faster and updates would end after half a year, if they happened at all, I barely have a reason to use a custom ROM these days.
I'm trying to use lineage at the minute, but xiaomi has made it next to impossible to even unlock the bootloader on my phone, and even then I'd likely need to move at least one of my banks as I seem to remember it not working on lineage, and I'm the target audience for a custom rom. For mass appeal it needs to be much easier, and without any compatibility issues with stock android. I cannot believe it's somehow standard to not allow bootloader unlocking on a device owned by the user, I am fully aware of the risks of it but phone companies insist on treating me like a complete idiot.
It's because of Google Play Services and the subsequent years long gutting of AOSPs application list. Google enforces OEMs to bundle their entire suite if they want to ship with Play Services and then uses that as an excuse to kill the basic AOSP phone apps that are outside of their ecosystem. That in turn harms the ability for Custom ROMs to ship basic apps like SMS readers, phone dialers and similar such, all of which used to be (maybe some still are, but they're all very much not well maintained) part of AOSP. If there's any silver lining, the upcoming play service blockade to install your own software on Android is likely going to at least create a burst of users for older devices.
The actual numbers are frankly even more disappointing - these numbers are heavily pushed up up by waydroid, which is an emulator for Android apps on Desktop Computing. More than half of the US installs is running Waydroid, with the actual most used real device in the US being nx_tab... which is LineageOS for the Nintendo Switch. That's a difference of 180k and 12k btw. The most used actual phone in the US for LineageOS is beyondx, which is the codename for the Galaxy S10 5g, a device that at a glance stopped being sold last year.
China by contrast fares much better when it comes to LineageOS (as Google Play Services isn't allowed in the country by export controls, the control from Google isn't nearly as strong there); the most used device there is actually a phone, the Xiaomi Mi 8 (dipper) and right behind it, the Xiaomi Mi 10T(/Pro) codenamed apollon.
Final country worth mentioning is Brazil, which apparently really likes the moto g7 power (ocean), a phone from roughly the same period as the Galaxy S10 5g.
Vietnam is also relatively high, with the Galaxy S7 (herolte) being the most used device. Russia is just a case where it's basically all waydroid users - not real phones.
At least from my understanding of the world, most of these numbers make sense if you consider them in proximity to US power, financial capabilities making phones last longer than their official support dates and just a rough idea of what phone brands are popular in which country.
Honestly I just don't really care to anymore. I used to flash custom ROMs on all my phones because I could only afford cheap (100-200€) phones that were filled with bloatware, but ever since I started being able to afford a decent mid-range phone (Pixel 6a was the first one I didn't reflash) I just found out I wasn't actually missing anything, and I definitely enjoy things like contactless payments, and not having something randomly break every time I update.
It's a combination of anti-competitive practices from Google (Play Integrity, more and more features locked behind closed source binaries instead of AOSP) and manufacturer locking the bootloaders much more than in the past.
I used to be a long time lineageos (and before that, cyanogenmod) user. Phones always felt faster, smoother, and with better battery life without all the bloat. Felt more secure too.
But at some point, I had a few apps that stopped working with unofficial ROMs, or with rooted phones. For a while, I played with magisk root hiding, but the play integrity api kept changing, it was just a hassle. Not worth it.
So now I have two phones. One with lineage, and my daily driver with a factory ROM.
I miss the free era from 10 years ago. Back then it was probably still called CM.
Now manufacturers are extremely closed: Xiaomi started by making Android ROMs, but today the most practical way to unlock its BL is through exploits...
I remember on xda with my Galaxy S Plus i9001 [1], we had:
- dual boot [2]
- Ubuntu touch [3]
- different kernels with various optimizations, overclocking, etc
- an absurd amount of ROMs, aside from CyanogenMod and LineagesOS there was ParanoidAndroid, Carbon, JellyBean, AICP, plus all the ROMs made specifically by users for this phone
- the latest linux kernel, somebody just compiled it for AOSP, I think it was version 3 or 4 against 2, which was the standard for every other phone, it ended up on some tech news website
I think It was a really great modding scene and a lot of people learnt stuff from that. Mainly by bricking their phones and having to fix them.
Note that these are the statistics coming from people who are willing to share statistics. Quite a few privacy-minded individuals use these ROMs but don't want to send telemetry, which means those installs don't make it into the statistics.
The large amount of Waydroid and Switch installs surprised me a little, but overall this is about what I expected in terms of distribution.
Recently installed LineageOS on an old Samsung tablet I had laying around. The thing was barely usable with whatever the highest Android version was it was comparable with. Now it works wonderfully! Really happy with it. Privacy features aside, Lineage can do wonders to revive old hardware
My Nokia T20 is getting to this point and I wish Lineage was an option. Sadly, I don't think it has enough of a footprint for anyone to bother with writing the firmware/drivers -- I wish I had the time to give it a serious try. Seeing this class of devices reduced to e-waste really bums me out. :(
PSA: LineageOS has some unofficial builds which works on earlier gen Amazon devices. I turned an Echo Show from an annoying ad machine into the device a Chumby always could have been.
Exactly. Of course not everything will work on every device, but they're not even going in that direction (like by incorporating/extending PHH patches) despite acknowledging that most devices won't be officially supported.
Surprised to see there're only one million devices with lineage OS installed. I personally installed it on a few amazon fire tablets. I thought it would be more than 10m devices at least.
I doubt whether those US numbers are real, lot of custom rom development/user base has been asian & european market in last decade even though the numbers have been decreasing over the decade (I don't have proof)...
Partially agree, as LOS is no where used as OEM and people familar with custom rom eventually would have used LOS (not mendatory but the numbers would relate)
Wow, that's not the distribution I expected; waydroid beats any other version... Though I guess that's not apples-apples since it aggregates any physical device running waydroid... And also I didn't expect unofficial builds to be so popular.
Interesting why there is no legal challenge for regulator to fine phone manufacturers for not allowing other operating systems. Any groups working on that?
Wow LineageOS really is a bazaar, and not a cathedral.
* 74% of installs are unofficial builds, not ones released by LineageOS.
* 2/3 of US installs are on non-phones (waydroid, nintendo switch, rpi, etc)
* Most of the installs on actual phones are in China, Brazil and Vietnam
* Less than 21% of installs are on versions that receive security updates, and less than 9% of installs are on the latest version (mostly because device's binary blobs don't support newer android versions?)
> * 74% of installs are unofficial builds, not ones released by LineageOS.
Every time I want to install LineageOS on a device because it's been abandoned by the manufacturer, it's also been abandoned by LineageOS, leaving me with some random custom rom as only option.
It is a great OS. It needs to be available on newer Motorolas, say 2024 and onward. People want SD card slots, and even 3.5mm headphone jacks. It is the memory card slot that matters most.
It is great to have a degoogled phone. Then the lack of a card slot annoys you and the desire to just plug in an aux cable and have sound anywhere without a dongle comes to the fore.
I wish they would just commit to also support the Motorola G Stylus line. The G Stylus 2024 was a great phone.
>> 74% of installs are unofficial builds, not ones released by LineageOS.
One of the first versions of LineageOS I used was Evolution X on my Moms old OnePlus phone since it wasn't supported by the "official" Lineage version. Great track record of almost daily updates, and the customization you could do with it was phenomenal. The funny thing was I was running Ubuntu Touch on it before and it was super sluggish (totally not expecting that tbh) so switched to Evolution and suddenly the same phone was really snappy and the battery lasted for almost two days.
But yeah, I'm not surprised many installs are just branched versions of the original since many of them you can run on phones that aren't supported by the official version.
the LineageOS teams refuses to incorporate patches to support MicroG as a replacement for Google Services so anyone (including me) that wants to follow that path is required to use unofficial builds.
They stopped that malpractice a while ago (last year?). Signature spoofing is now possible, so microG should work.
But they really hurt their credibility with the prior stance, and that their subreddit still has rules forbidding almost all discussions - interpreted as just closing all questions regarding blocked topics, like rooting, microG, Volte - is still a stain on an otherwise great project.
> They stopped that malpractice a while ago (last year?).
By now it has actually been almost two and a half years.
> But they really hurt their credibility with the prior stance, and that their subreddit still has rules forbidding almost all discussions [...].
While I'm not looking to turn this into an off-platform meta discussion, pretty much all of those rules have their very good reasons to be there.
As an example, you would be surprised how many people install a Magisk module to strip away LineageOS-specific build version properties, and then end up in our support platforms asking why the Updater can't search for new updates (of course while not mentioning that they have modified their system).
microG I don't even see listed as a part of any rule anymore, it was removed when upstream support for microG was merged.
Time flies :)
You are correct, the microG ban is gone from the sidebar. That's nice.
(Why this was so important: During covid the official contact tracker in Germany needed microG/the play services, a newer alternative than bundled the scanner or something, so worked without. When it becomes life and death impractical positions like that hurt).
It's okay if you dont want to discuss it. To share my position anyway: You need the option to have root so the device belongs you (and not the Rom), VoLTE is an existential threat and the ban stiffles all options to easily get information about the situation. That's the main point: Banning topics completely does only make things worse, and it is not like the project tried not to ban these topics for how many years now, a decade? An Autobot answer should suffice for making the problems known.
ah good to know. still since im already on the microg builds I'll keep using that until this phone dies so I'm still skewing the statistics
I can't find information about this except in a Reddit thread. Is it documented somewhere?
https://review.lineageos.org/c/LineageOS/android_frameworks_...
If you are talking about the addition of microG, that indeed seems like it hasn't been mentioned on the blog, although I'd argue very likely due to an oversight.
I can find internal conversations that it deserves to be announced in a more prominent way than on the "Sunsetting LineageOS 18.1" post, was left as "to be added to the LineageOS 22.x" blog post, and then just never made the initial draft. Whoops.
If you are talking about the rules on the subreddit (or the other social platforms), that one indeed has been discussed a lot on the platform itself (and which we usually keep available).
While my currently favored approach is GOS', I'd really like to know more. Did anything else change? I'm 15 years out of date. In my mind:
* root is still frowned upon
* microG is frowned upon
* bypassing SafetyNet (sorry, Play Integrity) is frowned upon
* bootloader relocking is not oficially nor semi-officially supported
* missing patches (Google's 6 month source embargo) were not talked about
i'm not sure all those "installs on actual phones" in china are real - 107k installs all on the same device, vs ~30k installs on the next most popular device. and 150k devices on an unknown carrier. is the Xiaomi Mi 8 really that popular for lineageOS, or is this some measurement artifact or common emulation setup?
The Xiaomi Mi 8 was the fastest-selling Xiaomi device of all time, it's estimated to have sold more than 20 Million units.
It was so crucial to Xiaomi's userbase that they supported it with updates for almost 8 (!) years.
So yeah, sounds feasible...
Mi 8 has a very good camera and battery life I am guessing it could be used as live streaming phone in china so still useful despite being an older device
I have an Mi 9 SE with Lineage and it's pretty well supported so the Mi 8 might just be as well...
Likely phones used in massive phone centres
These remind me of the cyanogenmod days where youre rom was AOSP or CM based and nearly every variant was CM based.
> 74% of installs are unofficial builds, not ones released by LineageOS.
Are these bot posting farms and click farms masquerading?
All of my installs I can think of are actually "unofficial builds", none of them are Smartphones.
There are e.g. LineageOS builds for Tablets and also Smarthome devices, like the Amazon Echo Show 5, Lenovo ThinkView Displays, etc.
I've installed it plenty, and its always been on "unsupported" hardware.
There's a big world out there.
Are theysaying that most installs are done on PC emulators and Linux STBs?
> non-phones (waydroid
Some Waydroid installations are on phones.
Given how uncommon x86 phones are (a few asus, lenovo, etc. that did not sell well) I think it's clear the vast majority of waydroid_x86_64 are not phones, right?
Many people that use linux distros like postmarketos on ARM phones also have waydroid for running android apps.
Right, but that would still not be x86_64 except on very uncommon phones. Look at the stats:
that mystery was quite easy to solve via Google.
Searching for "waydroid_x86_64 LineageOS 20.0" leads to a sourceforge page [0] of waydroid with LineageOS builds that have 70-80k downloads per month.
It seems to be popular to be installed on CachyOS, which in turn is the 2nd most popular distro to use Steam (after SteamOS itself), so my guess is that it's a popular setup for gaming...
[0] https://sourceforge.net/projects/waydroid/files/images/syste...
I have waydroid installed to run APKs on my Ubuntu Touch phone.
Is that really running x86_64?
To get to 2/3 of US installs, you have to sum all this stuff up including waydroid_arm64.
Are we seeing different stats? Clearly x86_64 is the vast majority of waydroid installs.
It’s quite hard to be official.
Exactly why I stopped installing LineageOS on my phone.
While part of it was that I was no longer interested in tinkering with ROM and playing cat-and-mouse game with SafetyNet/root detection/whatever, the other part is that I cannot trust these ROMs, some of which come (or came) with their own bloatware. Those that have official builds are of course better, but the overall experience and security situation is still much worse than OEM ROM, despite all the junk there.
P.S. another issue is that I became sick of is devs using xda forum as the only communication channel, including bug reports, updates etc. GitHub has existed for over a decade, and the issue tracker/release system is usable, yet they choose the worst way to do software engineering.
Agreed, the xda forum thing is a huge security smell. "Here, download this big binary from a random forum user and put it on a device you carry with you everywhere which is equipped with internet, camera, microphone, and GPS. You're welcome!"
The GrapheneOS setup seems a lot better (though it has more limited support).
They reduce their need for involvement by being very opinionated about what the project offers.
More projects should strive to establish a culture like GrapheneOS has.
It's quite sad to see these stats. It used to be the defacto standard for custom ROMs. These dwindling numbers make me think either people aren't as interested in custom ROMs anymore and using the (bloated/Google) factory ROMs or maybe there's some new standard.
Didn't these numbers used to be much, much higher in the past?
NB: Since I'm on GrapheneOS now I haven't looked back
Nowadays most devices can't be bootloader unlocked at all (see Huawei/BBK(Oppo,Vivo) in China) or can but with difficulties and, in some cases, little to no driver support (see Xiaomi or even Samsung's unlock procedures too, difficult to deal with from experience). So developers cannot develop ROMs as they cannot get on the phones anyway.
This is partly done, I think, to prevent users from uninstalling bloatware (Chinese brands doing this mostly), since I've had to deal with this on a BBK branded phone, locked down so far even ADB can't touch the bloat.
Google is also a part of this with play integrity and apps being blocked from working, so if you depend on Google or if you want to use that phone in your day-to-day life with apps from work or banking apps, it might not work great on the same phone.
In my opinion I think it is mostly the manufacturers fighting this, Google is solvable but a locked bootloader isn't.
- Spoofing SafetyNet used to be trivial, and not many apps depended on it; whereas these days, it's between hard and impossible to spoof Play Integrity, and it feels like much more apps depend on it. (At least, that's why I stopped rooting my phone.)
- If you want a non-bloated, mostly-AOSP ROM with updates for many years, installing LineageOS (or another third-party ROM) used to be the only option; whereas these days, the Pixel phones give you most of this, and you can just buy these in a store instead of needing to manually flash a ROM.
- The stock ROMs from most manufacturers are less horrible than they used to be. I'm not saying that they're great now, but there's a pretty huge difference between most new phones today and a KitKat-era cheap Samsung phone.
- As you said, I suspect that GrapheneOS has supplanted LineageOS for many of the enthusiast users.
I believe a lot of the enthusiasm we had at the start of the smartphone age is also now gone. The phone is now a boring device made for scrolling and running apps that are mandatory to participate in modern society.
> running apps that are mandatory to participate in modern society
This right here is why I no longer consider custom ROMs. My phone is a tool critical to my daily life and I need it to function correctly nearly 100% of the time. Custom ROMs never really reach that bar in my experience.
Also, the various forms of attestation allow corporations the power to punish me for having the temerity to modify my own property. Yet another way the tech industry has metastasized into a societal cancer.
> The phone is now a boring device made for scrolling and running apps that are mandatory to participate in modern society.
..a boring ¡spyware! device that tracks and listens to you!
Also you forgot to mention that you're sharing your personal and device details to our 1,893 e21 partners!
Really though, I'm just waiting for that AI agent that will help me shop online on my phone.. That's my vision of a perfect future!! /s
(how is this boring?:))
> NB: Since I'm on GrapheneOS now I haven't looked back
Not to suggest GrapheneOS has become the new "standard" given it currently only supports Pixels, but I hear a lot more about GrapheneOS as the custom Android build than LineageOS, so I wonder if a lot of people have moved there from LineageOS.
The other reason for a decline in custom ROMs may just be that apps are becoming more and more locked down. Banking apps are getting stricter all the time, so even the ones that work with custom ROMs today aren't guaranteed to work tomorrow. And more people probably use Google Wallet than ever, which also rules out custom ROMs AFAIK.
About 250k devices were getting GrapheneOS security updates two years ago[1], so it is approaching the number of official (and opt-in reported) installs of LineageOS.
[1]https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/12281-how-many-grapheneos-u...
I agree on the locked down part. Ever since I bought my first smartphone (HTC Desire) I've been flashing custom ROMs pretty much the day I bought it. In the beginning it was a hastle, then it became much easier. In 2021 and 2023 I bought a Xiaomi and it required registering before bootloader unlock was allowed. I didn't like I had to register, but did it anyway.
The real problem for me were the hard to come by blobs that needed flashing after certain updates. And the fact no official supported LineageOS build as available. That last one is mostly on my part for not checking before buying. But still, in the past pretty much any popular phone had one or more official builds supported on XDA. Nowadays you need to venture into Telegram groups scrolling over endless linear conversations of people asking the same issue over and over again. Maybe I'm just getting old, but what was wrong with using a (well structured) forum?
For me, I'm not that concerned with having contactless payments work. Although I did switch banks just to not have the Google Services/wallet requirement. That was short lived though, pretty much every contactless payment now only works with Google Wallet (ridiculous), I just gave up on it and pay by card instead.
I just want to get away from the fact Google Services is integrated into everything you do on your phone. The fact Google Wallet has access to not only the payments you make using NFC, but also the last x transactions on you bank account 'for fraud detection purposes' is quite insane if you ask me.
That's why I just run plain without Google Services (not even the sandboxed one by GrapheneOS) and accept the fact certain conveniences just isn't available for me.
I don't even miss rooting, which I mostly did in the past to have (non VPN based) add blocking on OS level. I just replaced most apps by their browser-based alterantives and use an add blocker there.
a significant contribution is due to android companies not allowing bootloader to be unlocked and then not providing kernel sources, making any development very hard, and many times impossible.
> or maybe there's some new standard.
China developed Harmony OS in response to American banning some of their brands from using Google Play.
https://www.huaweicentral.com/huawei-harmonyos-once-again-ov...
From what I understand, my phone's 4G won't work with lineage os and either of the two cell providers that have reception in my area so it's basically unusable for me. I would like to use it but I effectively can't.
Now that manufacturers support their devices for 5+ years and ROMs are actually quite usable out of the box, the need for custom ROMs is much lower. Plus, some convenience apps require things like remote attestation, getting in the way of users. I suspect a significant chunk of the serious ROM user base is also lost to GrapheneOS these days.
Even Samsung is fine with a quick debloating session you can do through WebUSB these days. The only phones I'd really need a custom ROM on these days are those certain Chinese brands that stuff their phone with absolute garbage. Compared to the days where a custom ROM would be faster and updates would end after half a year, if they happened at all, I barely have a reason to use a custom ROM these days.
I'm trying to use lineage at the minute, but xiaomi has made it next to impossible to even unlock the bootloader on my phone, and even then I'd likely need to move at least one of my banks as I seem to remember it not working on lineage, and I'm the target audience for a custom rom. For mass appeal it needs to be much easier, and without any compatibility issues with stock android. I cannot believe it's somehow standard to not allow bootloader unlocking on a device owned by the user, I am fully aware of the risks of it but phone companies insist on treating me like a complete idiot.
It's because of Google Play Services and the subsequent years long gutting of AOSPs application list. Google enforces OEMs to bundle their entire suite if they want to ship with Play Services and then uses that as an excuse to kill the basic AOSP phone apps that are outside of their ecosystem. That in turn harms the ability for Custom ROMs to ship basic apps like SMS readers, phone dialers and similar such, all of which used to be (maybe some still are, but they're all very much not well maintained) part of AOSP. If there's any silver lining, the upcoming play service blockade to install your own software on Android is likely going to at least create a burst of users for older devices.
The actual numbers are frankly even more disappointing - these numbers are heavily pushed up up by waydroid, which is an emulator for Android apps on Desktop Computing. More than half of the US installs is running Waydroid, with the actual most used real device in the US being nx_tab... which is LineageOS for the Nintendo Switch. That's a difference of 180k and 12k btw. The most used actual phone in the US for LineageOS is beyondx, which is the codename for the Galaxy S10 5g, a device that at a glance stopped being sold last year.
China by contrast fares much better when it comes to LineageOS (as Google Play Services isn't allowed in the country by export controls, the control from Google isn't nearly as strong there); the most used device there is actually a phone, the Xiaomi Mi 8 (dipper) and right behind it, the Xiaomi Mi 10T(/Pro) codenamed apollon.
Final country worth mentioning is Brazil, which apparently really likes the moto g7 power (ocean), a phone from roughly the same period as the Galaxy S10 5g.
Vietnam is also relatively high, with the Galaxy S7 (herolte) being the most used device. Russia is just a case where it's basically all waydroid users - not real phones.
At least from my understanding of the world, most of these numbers make sense if you consider them in proximity to US power, financial capabilities making phones last longer than their official support dates and just a rough idea of what phone brands are popular in which country.
Honestly I just don't really care to anymore. I used to flash custom ROMs on all my phones because I could only afford cheap (100-200€) phones that were filled with bloatware, but ever since I started being able to afford a decent mid-range phone (Pixel 6a was the first one I didn't reflash) I just found out I wasn't actually missing anything, and I definitely enjoy things like contactless payments, and not having something randomly break every time I update.
Have used LOS for a decade but then switched to GrapheneOS a few years ago. Both projects are a godsend though.
It's a combination of anti-competitive practices from Google (Play Integrity, more and more features locked behind closed source binaries instead of AOSP) and manufacturer locking the bootloaders much more than in the past.
I used to be a long time lineageos (and before that, cyanogenmod) user. Phones always felt faster, smoother, and with better battery life without all the bloat. Felt more secure too.
But at some point, I had a few apps that stopped working with unofficial ROMs, or with rooted phones. For a while, I played with magisk root hiding, but the play integrity api kept changing, it was just a hassle. Not worth it.
So now I have two phones. One with lineage, and my daily driver with a factory ROM.
Notice the most LineageOS installs is Waydroid...
I miss the free era from 10 years ago. Back then it was probably still called CM.
Now manufacturers are extremely closed: Xiaomi started by making Android ROMs, but today the most practical way to unlock its BL is through exploits...
I remember on xda with my Galaxy S Plus i9001 [1], we had:
- dual boot [2]
- Ubuntu touch [3]
- different kernels with various optimizations, overclocking, etc
- an absurd amount of ROMs, aside from CyanogenMod and LineagesOS there was ParanoidAndroid, Carbon, JellyBean, AICP, plus all the ROMs made specifically by users for this phone
- the latest linux kernel, somebody just compiled it for AOSP, I think it was version 3 or 4 against 2, which was the standard for every other phone, it ended up on some tech news website
I think It was a really great modding scene and a lot of people learnt stuff from that. Mainly by bricking their phones and having to fix them.
[1] https://xdaforums.com/f/galaxy-s-plus-i9001-android-developm...
[2] https://xdaforums.com/t/app-kernel-dual-boot-s-plus.2462783
[3] https://xdaforums.com/t/new-test-porting-ubuntu-touch.238260...
Interesting to see 1 os install per country of millions of people (EG: last entry, 161 installs: 160 in Argentina, 1 in the UK)
Note that these are the statistics coming from people who are willing to share statistics. Quite a few privacy-minded individuals use these ROMs but don't want to send telemetry, which means those installs don't make it into the statistics.
The large amount of Waydroid and Switch installs surprised me a little, but overall this is about what I expected in terms of distribution.
Recently installed LineageOS on an old Samsung tablet I had laying around. The thing was barely usable with whatever the highest Android version was it was comparable with. Now it works wonderfully! Really happy with it. Privacy features aside, Lineage can do wonders to revive old hardware
My Nokia T20 is getting to this point and I wish Lineage was an option. Sadly, I don't think it has enough of a footprint for anyone to bother with writing the firmware/drivers -- I wish I had the time to give it a serious try. Seeing this class of devices reduced to e-waste really bums me out. :(
> San Marino: 1 install
I feel like there's a problem in privacy in this dataset...
PSA: LineageOS has some unofficial builds which works on earlier gen Amazon devices. I turned an Echo Show from an annoying ad machine into the device a Chumby always could have been.
Note that these stats are based on opt-in data gathering.
they need to make a official GSI. until they do not they ll continue to decline.
Exactly. Of course not everything will work on every device, but they're not even going in that direction (like by incorporating/extending PHH patches) despite acknowledging that most devices won't be officially supported.
Surprised to see there're only one million devices with lineage OS installed. I personally installed it on a few amazon fire tablets. I thought it would be more than 10m devices at least.
The stats collection is opt-in
I doubt whether those US numbers are real, lot of custom rom development/user base has been asian & european market in last decade even though the numbers have been decreasing over the decade (I don't have proof)...
Using a custom ROM is not the same as using LineageOS in particular. Also, the numbers imply just 23% of LineageOS installs are in the US.
Partially agree, as LOS is no where used as OEM and people familar with custom rom eventually would have used LOS (not mendatory but the numbers would relate)
Wonder how much of those Waydroid installs are from scam farms. I can imagine some legit uses, but not this amount.
I'd be impressed if emulators are winning against big-tech in the spam wars. But perhaps there's spam uses that don't require the best antidetection.
If emulators worked, what's the point of those giant phone farms?
I don't know anything about this, so take it with a grain of salt.
I am just under the impression that a cheap real android is the fastest cheapest way to get a trustworthy-looking device for spamming purposes.
Why so few in Canada compared to the U.S?
Wow, that's not the distribution I expected; waydroid beats any other version... Though I guess that's not apples-apples since it aggregates any physical device running waydroid... And also I didn't expect unofficial builds to be so popular.
Would something like E/OS be considered a Official or Unofficial builds? I suppose Unofficial since it is a fork?
Many forks change the telemetry to their own servers so they won't show at all
Interesting why there is no legal challenge for regulator to fine phone manufacturers for not allowing other operating systems. Any groups working on that?
TIL waydroid...
That's really depressing.
Why so many Waydroid installs?
12 installs in North Korea
Number 4 is still the Samsung Galaxy S7...
I kind of miss that phone.
No S22 Ultra support is wild.
Dipper is the Xiaomi Mi 8
What are those names?
Code names for phones, all android builds (including official ones) have them.
https://storage.googleapis.com/play_public/supported_devices...
For a slightly more manageable list, the 590 of those that are or were supported officially are also listed on the LineageOS wiki [1].
[1] https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/
My device is not even listed there, so I suppose many others also run Lineage on plenty of unvendored devices.
Herolte is the galaxy s7(number 4).