Comment by pavon
16 hours ago
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.
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I can't find information about this except in a Reddit thread. Is it documented somewhere?
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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'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.
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).
currently on GraphineOS for those very reasons. There is some amazing stuff in XDA forums but ultimately it's just some random guy posting some random ROM.
Only way I was able to get Cyanogenmod on stuff back in the day, was to use shady hacks from XDA, but man it was super slow and seemed to use a ton of bandwidth...
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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I have waydroid installed to run APKs on my Ubuntu Touch phone.
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To get to 2/3 of US installs, you have to sum all this stuff up including waydroid_arm64.
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Are theysaying that most installs are done on PC emulators and Linux STBs?
It’s quite hard to be official.