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> * 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.

>> 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.

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?

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?

Are theysaying that most installs are done on PC emulators and Linux STBs?

> non-phones (waydroid

Some Waydroid installations are on phones.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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...

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. :(

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.

The stats collection is opt-in

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.

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.

Many forks change the telemetry to their own servers so they won't show at all

Code names for phones, all android builds (including official ones) have them.

https://storage.googleapis.com/play_public/supported_devices...

Herolte is the galaxy s7(number 4).