Hi folks, got any idea of the number of GrapheneOS users ? Is it something you can estimate ?

    Eirikr70 last estimate was somewhere in the region of 80,000+ users based solely on requests to the update server and I do emphasise unidentifiable requests.

      a year later

      Eirikr70 I remember reading here that the number of users is around 200 000 but I can't confirm it.

        80,000 to 200,000 seems a rather large difference between estimates.

        Curious to know where the 200,000 came from.

        • de0u replied to this.
          8 months later

          also interesting would be the number of LineageOS users (the main competitor). But it seems there are no numbers available from LineageOS

            Eirikr70 any news about the number of users as of today ?

            ~250k to ~300k+ users on the official releases based on update download statistics. Don't have a way of knowing how many are on the many forks of it though.

            Scott the main competitor

            GrapheneOS and LineageOS are very different. GrapheneOS is a hardened OS with substantial privacy/security improvements:

            https://grapheneos.org/features

            LineageOS is not hardened. It greatly reduces security vs. AOSP via added attack surface, weakened security model and slow patches.

                Eirikr70

                Does GrapheneOS care how many people use the OS? I wonder what incentive there is, if any, for getting more users.

                Perhaps more users ultimately equates to more donors as you have more people at the top of the funnel. Perhaps it equates to more non-monetary contributors to the project as well. But otherwise, for a completely FOSS project, I wonder how relevant a metric that is to the devs/leaders of the project.

                There are around 1.4 billion iPhone users in the world so even if we round up the number of GrapheneOS users to 400,000 that means it is around 0.03%

                I'm not sure how the numbers are super relevant except I can see one path where a larger userbase could be profitable. If Graphene were to partner with a hardware manufacturer who builds a phone to Graphene devs' specs and if Graphene could get a cut of every phone sold. The OS could still remain FOSS and be available on pixel devices, but also on this custom "GraphenOS dev sanctioned" hardware where there is a great financial flywheel that could be created to help the project grow.

                    treenutz68
                    Can people not take joy in seeing others care for their privacy and security? To know that your hard work is of benefit to people and not a waste? There's no reason why everything has to be transactional/monetary.

                        I am wondering, what are the "many forks" of GrapheneOS?

                        I know Nitrokey phones but afaik they just preinstall GrapheneOS

                        Then there was this one scammer company from somewhere in Europe that used GrapheneOS on cheapo phones, havent heard from them anymore.

                        Then there is "un plug gedphone" which uses "Li bertOS" no idea what that is based on, they steal Hypatia from DivestOS and are shady as heck, their hardware is likely also very cheap.

                        Then there is BharOS, a closed source indian GrapheneOS fork for use in Governments, that sounds like the only real fork out there.

                        And the FBI might have forked GrapheneOS but no idea how reliable that is.

                        I know no other forks or potential forks.

                        Dumdum

                        No one said everything has to be transactional/monetary, except for you ;)

                        And I am sure the project members take joy in seeing others improve their privacy/security. But I think if GrapheneOS had 20 users, the project could not pay the devs (who need to eat) who create all of these amazing features for privacy and security. The crux of my post was how could the project get to the next level that they (I imagine) would like to get to, and I imagine money is a bottleneck as it typically is in most businesses/non-profits.

                        I imagine if you asked the Graphene team, they'd tell you they could ship more features even faster if they had more money to work with...