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.
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?
I don't think so. Better to have captive customers on contracts if that is their goal, no?
For the ISP sure, but for Google? I don't really think they would care all that much.
I guess what I'm getting at is if you buy a phone outright, you have no incentive to keep using it....other than of course wasting your money. But there's no additional penalty keeping you from leaving the Pixel ecosystem, the financial damage is done.
On a contract, you have a financial penalty for the act of leaving early. So it disincentivizes leaving before 2 years or whatever the length of the contract.
So Google can say to carriers "Hey, we will subsidize our phones for you so you can give them away on contract. You get a captive customer, we get good odds of 2 years of valuable data.
I don't know if I'm right about any of this, but it explains a lot of questions I have about why Pixels are far and away the best value you can get on contract with any provider, where I am anyway.
I mean it's technically possible. But don't really believe that to be the case. Either why, in my opinion we one shouldn't spread information or theories without any concrete evidence at all. It's not like I feel sorry for Google or whatever I'm just tired of the constant misinformation and conspiracy theories.
The Pixel might be subsidized to get Android some more market share from Apple, or earn more money Google Play Store sales or whatever. Subsidizing your phone business just to collect more data might make some sense unless you are Google which already knows everything about everyone.
I wouldn't call it a conspiracy theory any more than saying Facebook is free because you're the product. To each their own though!
Pixels aren't free though.