someone1223 I believe the privacy community is not making enough noise in the public to be taken seriously by others, and is considered "niche". We should talk more about GOS in platforms like X and pressure companies to allow custom OS like GOS.
One thing to keep in mind: rumor has it there are between 100,000 and 200,000 GrapheneOS users, spread across multiple years and multiple series of Pixel.
Meanwhile, "the Internet" (Times of India) says Google has recently been selling around 1,000,000 Pixels per month, which in turn is dwarfed by Samsung's (Statista) 20,000,000 per month.
If you're a big phone vendor like Samsung, or a modest phone vendor like Google, would 100,000 privacy-minded purchasers per month register? Maybe? But the GrapheneOS head count is a long way from that kind of number. So maybe we are a niche variety of user at present.
How about a small vendor like Fairphone? Their forum claims Fairphone sold 100,000 units in 2022. Would it be worth their while to dramatically invest in improved hardware security if they could scoop up the entire GrapheneOS community? Maybe? But probably some GrapheneOS users would keep on buying Pixels to get things like wireless charging, great cameras, etc. So maybe at present we would be a niche constituency even for a small phone vendor.
There are arguments other than head count which might sway a hardware vendor (and, indeed, it seems as if Google has opened their platform a fair amount for non-head-count reasons). But the bottom line is a big deal for small companies.
Overall, growing the size of the GrapheneOS user community by a factor of 10 or 100 might attract more interest from hardware vendors. Aside from contributing financially to the project, those of us on this forum can contribute by welcoming new users and being supportive.