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 [https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/115594050576298731] 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
[https://www.statista.com/chart/25463/popularity-of-google-smartphones/] uses
more Google Pixel phones than the United States. The Pixel 9 series was also a
big jump in market share
[https://www.theshortcut.com/p/google-pixel-9-sales-2024] 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:
[https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/381592db-c09b-4c63-a102-e5e9f7b4768d.png] Even
with generous estimates to Google’s market share, GrapheneOS still makes up a
large portion of their users.
It’s an interesting statistic, but one reason the numbers are so high is that a Pixel is the only supported device for GrapheneOS. This is why I will never use it, used Pixels are way overpriced and new ones are overpriced and sold by Google.