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?)
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.
>> 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.
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?
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?
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.
> 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.
The people behind GrapheneOS have a really nasty attitude towards any OSS initiatives in the smartphone space that aren't GrapheneOS. Really soured me on using their ROM.
I often see them being on point and highlighting important details. Majority of custom roms aren't taking security seriously, so I don't think there's anything wrong with calling them out on that.
- 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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)...
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
>> 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.
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?
To get to 2/3 of US installs, you have to sum all this stuff up including waydroid_arm64.
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...
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
It’s quite hard to be official.
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.
Have used LOS for a decade but then switched to GrapheneOS a few years ago. Both projects are a godsend though.
> 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.
The people behind GrapheneOS have a really nasty attitude towards any OSS initiatives in the smartphone space that aren't GrapheneOS. Really soured me on using their ROM.
Could you please share some examples?
I often see them being on point and highlighting important details. Majority of custom roms aren't taking security seriously, so I don't think there's anything wrong with calling them out on that.
- 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.
> 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?:))
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.
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.
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.
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...
Would something like E/OS be considered a Official or Unofficial builds? I suppose Unofficial since it is a fork?
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.
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.
Note that these stats are based on opt-in data gathering.
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.
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.
Why so many Waydroid installs?
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.
That's really depressing.
TIL waydroid...
What are those names?
Code names for phones, all android builds (including official ones) have them.
https://storage.googleapis.com/play_public/supported_devices...
Dipper is the Xiaomi Mi 8
12 installs in North Korea