Birbla

Discussion summary

LineageOS discussions include support issues for the Galaxy S22 Ultra and various device code names like Herolte (S7) and Dipper (Xiaomi Mi 8). Some users mention Waydroid installations, including 12 in North Korea.

What the discussion says

  • Support for newer devices like S22 Ultra is lacking.
  • Device code names are common for Android builds.
  • Waydroid installations vary by region.
“No S22 Ultra support is wild.”
— rupx
“Herolte is the galaxy s7.”
— firebot

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  • Hacker News
  • Wow, that's not the distribution I expected; waydroid beats any other version... Though I guess that's not apples-apples since it aggregates any physical device running waydroid... And also I didn't expect unofficial builds to be so popular.
    by yjftsjthsd-h
  • Wonder how much of those Waydroid installs are from scam farms. I can imagine some legit uses, but not this amount.
    by poisonborz
  • I'd be impressed if emulators are winning against big-tech in the spam wars. But perhaps there's spam uses that don't require the best antidetection.

    If emulators worked, what's the point of those giant phone farms?

    I don't know anything about this, so take it with a grain of salt.

    I am just under the impression that a cheap real android is the fastest cheapest way to get a trustworthy-looking device for spamming purposes.

    by Cider9986
  • they need to make a official GSI. until they do not they ll continue to decline.
    by nicman23
  • Exactly. Of course not everything will work on every device, but they're not even going in that direction (like by incorporating/extending PHH patches) despite acknowledging that most devices won't be officially supported.
    by zb3
  • > San Marino: 1 install

    I feel like there's a problem in privacy in this dataset...

    by NooneAtAll3
  • Note that these stats are based on opt-in data gathering.
    by 28304283409234
  • Recently installed LineageOS on an old Samsung tablet I had laying around. The thing was barely usable with whatever the highest Android version was it was comparable with. Now it works wonderfully! Really happy with it. Privacy features aside, Lineage can do wonders to revive old hardware
    by 40four
  • My Nokia T20 is getting to this point and I wish Lineage was an option. Sadly, I don't think it has enough of a footprint for anyone to bother with writing the firmware/drivers -- I wish I had the time to give it a serious try. Seeing this class of devices reduced to e-waste really bums me out. :(
    by ethagnawl
  • PSA: LineageOS has some unofficial builds which works on earlier gen Amazon devices. I turned an Echo Show from an annoying ad machine into the device a Chumby always could have been.
    by RajT88
  • Notice the most LineageOS installs is Waydroid...

    I miss the free era from 10 years ago. Back then it was probably still called CM.

    Now manufacturers are extremely closed: Xiaomi started by making Android ROMs, but today the most practical way to unlock its BL is through exploits...

    by linzhangrun
  • I remember on xda with my Galaxy S Plus i9001 [1], we had:

    - dual boot [2]

    - Ubuntu touch [3]

    - different kernels with various optimizations, overclocking, etc

    - an absurd amount of ROMs, aside from CyanogenMod and LineagesOS there was ParanoidAndroid, Carbon, JellyBean, AICP, plus all the ROMs made specifically by users for this phone

    - the latest linux kernel, somebody just compiled it for AOSP, I think it was version 3 or 4 against 2, which was the standard for every other phone, it ended up on some tech news website

    I think It was a really great modding scene and a lot of people learnt stuff from that. Mainly by bricking their phones and having to fix them.

    [1] https://xdaforums.com/f/galaxy-s-plus-i9001-android-developm...

    [2] https://xdaforums.com/t/app-kernel-dual-boot-s-plus.2462783

    [3] https://xdaforums.com/t/new-test-porting-ubuntu-touch.238260...

    by DuncanCoffee
  • Note that these are the statistics coming from people who are willing to share statistics. Quite a few privacy-minded individuals use these ROMs but don't want to send telemetry, which means those installs don't make it into the statistics.

    The large amount of Waydroid and Switch installs surprised me a little, but overall this is about what I expected in terms of distribution.

    by jeroenhd
  • It's quite sad to see these stats. It used to be the defacto standard for custom ROMs. These dwindling numbers make me think either people aren't as interested in custom ROMs anymore and using the (bloated/Google) factory ROMs or maybe there's some new standard.

    Didn't these numbers used to be much, much higher in the past?

    NB: Since I'm on GrapheneOS now I haven't looked back

    by XiS
  • Now that manufacturers support their devices for 5+ years and ROMs are actually quite usable out of the box, the need for custom ROMs is much lower. Plus, some convenience apps require things like remote attestation, getting in the way of users. I suspect a significant chunk of the serious ROM user base is also lost to GrapheneOS these days.

    Even Samsung is fine with a quick debloating session you can do through WebUSB these days. The only phones I'd really need a custom ROM on these days are those certain Chinese brands that stuff their phone with absolute garbage. Compared to the days where a custom ROM would be faster and updates would end after half a year, if they happened at all, I barely have a reason to use a custom ROM these days.

    by jeroenhd
  • I'm trying to use lineage at the minute, but xiaomi has made it next to impossible to even unlock the bootloader on my phone, and even then I'd likely need to move at least one of my banks as I seem to remember it not working on lineage, and I'm the target audience for a custom rom. For mass appeal it needs to be much easier, and without any compatibility issues with stock android. I cannot believe it's somehow standard to not allow bootloader unlocking on a device owned by the user, I am fully aware of the risks of it but phone companies insist on treating me like a complete idiot.
    by reorder9695
  • It's because of Google Play Services and the subsequent years long gutting of AOSPs application list. Google enforces OEMs to bundle their entire suite if they want to ship with Play Services and then uses that as an excuse to kill the basic AOSP phone apps that are outside of their ecosystem. That in turn harms the ability for Custom ROMs to ship basic apps like SMS readers, phone dialers and similar such, all of which used to be (maybe some still are, but they're all very much not well maintained) part of AOSP. If there's any silver lining, the upcoming play service blockade to install your own software on Android is likely going to at least create a burst of users for older devices.

    The actual numbers are frankly even more disappointing - these numbers are heavily pushed up up by waydroid, which is an emulator for Android apps on Desktop Computing. More than half of the US installs is running Waydroid, with the actual most used real device in the US being nx_tab... which is LineageOS for the Nintendo Switch. That's a difference of 180k and 12k btw. The most used actual phone in the US for LineageOS is beyondx, which is the codename for the Galaxy S10 5g, a device that at a glance stopped being sold last year.

    China by contrast fares much better when it comes to LineageOS (as Google Play Services isn't allowed in the country by export controls, the control from Google isn't nearly as strong there); the most used device there is actually a phone, the Xiaomi Mi 8 (dipper) and right behind it, the Xiaomi Mi 10T(/Pro) codenamed apollon.

    Final country worth mentioning is Brazil, which apparently really likes the moto g7 power (ocean), a phone from roughly the same period as the Galaxy S10 5g.

    Vietnam is also relatively high, with the Galaxy S7 (herolte) being the most used device. Russia is just a case where it's basically all waydroid users - not real phones.

    At least from my understanding of the world, most of these numbers make sense if you consider them in proximity to US power, financial capabilities making phones last longer than their official support dates and just a rough idea of what phone brands are popular in which country.

    by noirscape
  • Have used LOS for a decade but then switched to GrapheneOS a few years ago. Both projects are a godsend though.
    by preisschild
  • It's a combination of anti-competitive practices from Google (Play Integrity, more and more features locked behind closed source binaries instead of AOSP) and manufacturer locking the bootloaders much more than in the past.
    by realusername
  • > NB: Since I'm on GrapheneOS now I haven't looked back

    Not to suggest GrapheneOS has become the new "standard" given it currently only supports Pixels, but I hear a lot more about GrapheneOS as the custom Android build than LineageOS, so I wonder if a lot of people have moved there from LineageOS.

    The other reason for a decline in custom ROMs may just be that apps are becoming more and more locked down. Banking apps are getting stricter all the time, so even the ones that work with custom ROMs today aren't guaranteed to work tomorrow. And more people probably use Google Wallet than ever, which also rules out custom ROMs AFAIK.

    by NoboruWataya
  • - Spoofing SafetyNet used to be trivial, and not many apps depended on it; whereas these days, it's between hard and impossible to spoof Play Integrity, and it feels like much more apps depend on it. (At least, that's why I stopped rooting my phone.)

    - If you want a non-bloated, mostly-AOSP ROM with updates for many years, installing LineageOS (or another third-party ROM) used to be the only option; whereas these days, the Pixel phones give you most of this, and you can just buy these in a store instead of needing to manually flash a ROM.

    - The stock ROMs from most manufacturers are less horrible than they used to be. I'm not saying that they're great now, but there's a pretty huge difference between most new phones today and a KitKat-era cheap Samsung phone.

    - As you said, I suspect that GrapheneOS has supplanted LineageOS for many of the enthusiast users.

    by gucci-on-fleek
  • Nowadays most devices can't be bootloader unlocked at all (see Huawei/BBK(Oppo,Vivo) in China) or can but with difficulties and, in some cases, little to no driver support (see Xiaomi or even Samsung's unlock procedures too, difficult to deal with from experience). So developers cannot develop ROMs as they cannot get on the phones anyway.

    This is partly done, I think, to prevent users from uninstalling bloatware (Chinese brands doing this mostly), since I've had to deal with this on a BBK branded phone, locked down so far even ADB can't touch the bloat.

    Google is also a part of this with play integrity and apps being blocked from working, so if you depend on Google or if you want to use that phone in your day-to-day life with apps from work or banking apps, it might not work great on the same phone.

    In my opinion I think it is mostly the manufacturers fighting this, Google is solvable but a locked bootloader isn't.

    by aguyongithub
  • Wow LineageOS really is a bazaar, and not a cathedral.

    * 74% of installs are unofficial builds, not ones released by LineageOS.

    * 2/3 of US installs are on non-phones (waydroid, nintendo switch, rpi, etc)

    * Most of the installs on actual phones are in China, Brazil and Vietnam

    * Less than 21% of installs are on versions that receive security updates, and less than 9% of installs are on the latest version (mostly because device's binary blobs don't support newer android versions?)

    by pavon
  • It’s quite hard to be official.
    by adithyassekhar
  • > non-phones (waydroid

    Some Waydroid installations are on phones.

    by seba_dos1
  • These remind me of the cyanogenmod days where youre rom was AOSP or CM based and nearly every variant was CM based.
    by notesinthefield
  • i'm not sure all those "installs on actual phones" in china are real - 107k installs all on the same device, vs ~30k installs on the next most popular device. and 150k devices on an unknown carrier. is the Xiaomi Mi 8 really that popular for lineageOS, or is this some measurement artifact or common emulation setup?
    by notatoad
  • the LineageOS teams refuses to incorporate patches to support MicroG as a replacement for Google Services so anyone (including me) that wants to follow that path is required to use unofficial builds.
    by dahrkael
  • >> 74% of installs are unofficial builds, not ones released by LineageOS.

    One of the first versions of LineageOS I used was Evolution X on my Moms old OnePlus phone since it wasn't supported by the "official" Lineage version. Great track record of almost daily updates, and the customization you could do with it was phenomenal. The funny thing was I was running Ubuntu Touch on it before and it was super sluggish (totally not expecting that tbh) so switched to Evolution and suddenly the same phone was really snappy and the battery lasted for almost two days.

    But yeah, I'm not surprised many installs are just branched versions of the original since many of them you can run on phones that aren't supported by the official version.

    by burningChrome
  • > * 74% of installs are unofficial builds, not ones released by LineageOS.

    Every time I want to install LineageOS on a device because it's been abandoned by the manufacturer, it's also been abandoned by LineageOS, leaving me with some random custom rom as only option.

    by fer