[pavon]

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?)

[fer]

> * 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.

[economistbob]

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.

[burningChrome]

>> 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.

[dahrkael]

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.

[notatoad]

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?

[rickdeckard]

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...

[GreenWatermelon]

Mine is Mi 9T, and I've been running Lineage OS for years now. Its codename is Davinci and according to dtats, it has almost 2k installs.

[xbmcuser]

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

[darkwater]

I have an Mi 9 SE with Lineage and it's pretty well supported so the Mi 8 might just be as well...

[ulfw]

Likely phones used in massive phone centres

[notesinthefield]

These remind me of the cyanogenmod days where youre rom was AOSP or CM based and nearly every variant was CM based.

[seba_dos1]

> non-phones (waydroid

Some Waydroid installations are on phones.

[SahAssar]

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?

[ioanaci]

Many people that use linux distros like postmarketos on ARM phones also have waydroid for running android apps.

[SahAssar]

Right, but that would still not be x86_64 except on very uncommon phones. Look at the stats:

    waydroid_x86_64         181015
    waydroid_arm64          8718
    waydroid_tv_x86_64      3200
    waydroid_x86            1215
    waydroid_arm64_only     914
    waydroid_car_arm64_only 69
    ---
    usa_total               337390

[rickdeckard]

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...

[seba_dos1]

To get to 2/3 of US installs, you have to sum all this stuff up including waydroid_arm64.

[SahAssar]

Are we seeing different stats? Clearly x86_64 is the vast majority of waydroid installs.

    waydroid_x86_64         181015
    waydroid_arm64          8718
    waydroid_tv_x86_64      3200
    waydroid_x86            1215
    waydroid_arm64_only     914
    waydroid_car_arm64_only 69
    ---
    usa_total               337390

[seba_dos1]

Nobody was saying anything about x86_64 being the vast majority of Waydroid installs or not but you, so not sure what's your point. Read my first comment again.

[SahAssar]

The parent said "2/3 of US installs are on non-phones (waydroid, nintendo switch, rpi, etc)", you responded with "Some Waydroid installations are on phones". My response to you was about the vast majority of waydroid installs tracked here are highly unlikely to be on phones due to the CPU architecture.

[flaburgan]

I have waydroid installed to run APKs on my Ubuntu Touch phone.

[SahAssar]

Is that really running x86_64?

[adithyassekhar]

It’s quite hard to be official.

[deeddy]

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

[khurs]

> 74% of installs are unofficial builds, not ones released by LineageOS.

Are these bot posting farms and click farms masquerading?

[rickdeckard]

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.

[dormento]

I've installed it plenty, and its always been on "unsupported" hardware.

There's a big world out there.

[fg137]

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.

[empyrrhicist]

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).

[DANmode]

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.

[red-iron-pine]

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...

[bentcorner]

xda is older than github and has a lot of institutional inertia. Also I get the impression that many of the people involved in the xda ecosystem are hobbyists that just kind of learn things as they go along and have less exposure to bigco software engineering practices.

[fg137]

You talk as if github is a daunting service only meant for enterprise customers.

When in reality it's easy to sign up and used by almost every kind of project you can think of, including someone's 100 line random bash script with a single sentence README, a tiny embedded device hobby project all the way to a vibe coded project, from people who know nothing about software engineering. Issues are PRs are regularly used for all those projects. You almost need to go extra mile to not put your stuff on github.

I don't think there is any reasonable excuse/explanation other than "inertia".