I wanted to share an interesting statistic with you. Approximately 1 out of every 25 people with a Google Pixel phone is running GrapheneOS right now. While it’s difficult to get an exact number, we can make educated guesses to get an approximate number.
How many GrapheneOS users are there? According to an estimate released by GrapheneOS today, the number of GrapheneOS devices is approaching 400,000. This estimate is based on the number of devices that downloaded recent GrapheneOS updates. Some users may have multiple devices, such as organizations, and some users may download and flash updates externally, but it’s the best estimate we have.
How many Google Pixel users are there? Despite Google’s extensive data collection, this one is surprisingly harder to estimate, since Google hasn’t released an exact number. There’s a number floating around that Google has 4-5% of the smartphone market, which is between 10 million and 13.2 million users in the United States. I can’t find the source of where this information came from. That number is problematic, too, because Japan supposedly uses more Google Pixel phones than the United States. The Pixel 9 series was also a big jump in market share for Google. I couldn’t find any numbers smaller than 10 million, and it made the math nice, so that is what I went with.
Putting the numbers together, it means that 4% of Google Pixel users are running GrapheneOS. That means in a room of 25 Google Pixel users, 1 of them will be a GrapheneOS user. If you include all custom Android operating systems, that number would certainly be much, much higher.
To put it into perspective, each pixel in this image represents ~5 Google Pixel users. Each white pixel represents that those ~5 people use GrapheneOS:
Even with generous estimates to Google’s market share, GrapheneOS still makes up a large portion of their users.
Google sold 40 million Pixels between 2016 and 2023, and that number has grown rapidly in the last few years. I think an estimate of around 40 million active Pixel phones is reasonable, which would give GrapheneOS a relative market share of 1%; certainly less than 2%.
I’m certain that most people between 2016 and 2023 bought multiple devices to upgrade old ones.
I’m on, I think, my 3rd Pixel. All of them were chosen because of the possibility of putting a third-party firmware on them, but my current one is the first I’ve actually done it to.
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Do you walk up to every stranger with a Pixel and ask if they run GrapheneOS? No?
Lol I talk to family, friends, colleagues, people I play ports with. Have literally never once seen a Graphene phone.
I literally cannot think of anyone anymore who even roots their phone, let alone installs a third party OS.
Y’all are honestly deluded if you think it’s remotely close to OPs numbers.
I doubt OP’s numbers, but your experience is not representative data of anything except your friend group.
Friend group, work group, sports groups, friends of friends met at parties etc. It’s a sample size in the hundreds, and includes dozens who used to root their phones and install third party OSes in the early days of Android. It’s not insignificant to see zero usage when OP is claiming 50%. If their numbers are to be believed there should be regions where there’s close to 100% usage.