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.
I never would have guessed anywhere near 400k, that’s wild!
I’m surprised it isn’t more.
Pixels are the reference platform for a lot of open-source phone operating systems. A disproportionate number of people who purchased Pixels are the type of person who did believe Googles motto of “Don’t be Evil”, even after Google abandoned the motto.
Now that Google is inarguably Evil (not Musk Evil, but definitely more Evil than Apple), these people are searching for solutions. They are gun-shy and are not likely to get an Evil iPhone, have a large investment in the Android ecosystem so are unlikely to pivot to Linux Phone, and the niche Android variants are more likely to be assassinated by Google.
GrapheneOS is the obvious choice. I’m surprised it isn’t a higher percentage.
I wonder how accurate it is. I have run Graphene off and on over the years but keep going back to stock.
I’m sure it’s a mix, but I would expect fewer people that have GrapheneOS because they have a Pixel than have a Pixel because they are the only devices supported by GrapheneOS.
That is exactly right. But the demographic of Pixel owners likely to install GrapheneOS (or Sailfish or Ubuntu Touch or whatever) and the demographic of GrapheneOS users likely to buy a Pixel probably has a fair overlap.
Considering that they sell Pixels at normal stores, unlike the Nexus devices that came before them. It shouldn’t be any wonder that there’s a lot of normal people using them. Especially when only google was offering long software support for Android phones.
Long-term support is never something that Normies (that don’t want iPhones) contemplate. They would rather buy the cheapest phone; they don’t see the value in a software vendor supported phone. That is why Samsung is more of a household name than Pixel.
Google have also shown that their long-term support is pointless when they pivot and implement their own version of Apples “walled garden” on the Play Store and the Android ecosystem.
Their implied guarantee of openness is just as facetious as Apples implied guarantee of privacy.