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.

Pixels are dirt cheap because Google is harvesting massive amounts of data from Pixel users, so they give them away.

GrapheneOS lets you have a cheap Pixel without Google knowing everything about you, and those near you.

oasis
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1316h

Pixels cost around the same as any other phone from Samsung, Oneplus, or whatever.

Maybe if you’re buying them outright?

Where I am, you can get them (with a contract obviously) for 0 dollars up front and like 4 bucks a month for 2 years. And no other similar phone has the same deals. So it could be between Google and the cell provider.

oasis
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14h

Sure but if Google wanted to push the devices onto people because of tracking purposes wouldn’t they also make them cheaper to buy outright?

@Bloefz@lemmy.world
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18h

Give them away? Not really, Samsung S series are the same pricing as pixels here where I live. The pixel a is different of course, it’s more like a Samsung FE.

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