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.
Makes sense. Pixel is the successor to Nexus, which was always meant for tinkerers. The Pixel is (was?) sold unlocked, too. Unless you bought it from a carrier.
Pixel is also underpowered compared to iPhone and Galaxy, but priced similarly. So either you buy it because you just love Google that much… or you want to do something else with it.
Wondering if Graphene OS supports the AI hallucination camera mode on the Pixel 10 Pro where you zoom it at “100X” and it makes up details. Don’t get me wrong here — as an iPhone/Galaxy user (I main the iPhone but I do use both, and have also used HTC and Motorola) I think the feature is awesome… unless you’re trying to capture text. In which case it won’t work. Well, it’ll try to work. It won’t work well. And I don’t suppose you could show it the text later and update the 100X photo, but if you had that opportunity, you would just take a better picture up close.
I have a Pixel 9 Pro because when I bought it it had the best camera that you can could in Europe. I tried the best iPhone and Samsung phones at the time and Pixel was for sure better, especially in low-light conditions.
Only Huawei has better cameras (by a fair margin as well). I’ve never experienced that it feels slow or underpowered, but maybe that’s the case on paper.