Summer Survey 2 results

Let’s talk about the second Summer Survey and its results. This year, about 1% of our users (at the time of writing) took the survey - this more or less matches last year’s situation: the results are not reflective of our entire user base, but we’ll analyze the feedback nonetheless.

Builds

We’ve seen an increase of unofficial builds this year (19.9%), probably due to our stricter requirements for official builds defined by the charter.

64% of the people surveyed had at least one device running 15.1, while 40% had a 14.1 device. Phones are undoubtedly the most common form factor of Lineage devices: 96.7% of respondents have at least one phone running Lineage, while only 9.4% own a tablet with Lineage installed.

There’s also been an increase in the number of users not using Google apps this year: 14.6% compared to last year’s 10%.

Apps

The apps you’d like to see improved in the next LineageOS version are Snap (the camera app), Trebuchet, Gallery and AudioFX. The least used app remains Jelly.

Based on the freeform message responses at the end of the survey we noted there were two distinct categories of users: some who’d like us to replace (almost) all of our apps with Google’s (which we can’t do due to their closed source licenses) and others who enjoy LineageOS apps and provided useful ideas for improvements. Some of you also suggested that we use existing open source apps instead of our own, but because of licensing issues, we won’t be able to do so in most cases - you’ll still have to install them on your own.

These results show a very diverse user-base, so we’ll work our best to satisfy as many of those voices as we can.

Features

All the features we asked for feedback on received positive feedback.

Privacy Guard was the most loved feature, scoring 4.19 / 5. Many of you said it’s one of the primary reasons you use LineageOS. LiveDisplay and Styles both scored 4.04 / 5.

The Trust interface, even in its early stages got a reasonable 3.94 / 5: we have many ideas for new features that will be under the Trust branding in 16.0. Other features such as our lockscreen improvements scored 4.09 / 5, system profiles 3.71 / 5 and statusbar customizations 4.02 / 5.

Public relations

Our regularly irregular reviews (changelogs) were said to be too cryptic for less experienced users. We’ll try to make them more accessible in the future.

Lineage Engineering only has two articles at the time of writing (others are being delayed due to the 16.0 bringup process). The articles so far have been well-received by our community - you all seem interested in how things work under the hood. We can’t wait to share more articles so you can better understand how Android’s internals work.

Infrastructure

The wiki was rated 3.77 / 5 and the download portal scored 4.17 / 5.

The biggest complaint regarding the website is the lack of information about what LineageOS is. The good news is, we’re already working on getting this complaint addressed.

As seen last year, a large portion of respondents are not aware of some of our platforms such as the subreddit (r/LineageOS), JIRA for bug reporting and the IRC channels on Libera.Chat (#lineageos for general chat and #lineageos-dev for more technical discussions).

Your messages

First of all, we want to apologize to all of you for the issue that prevented you from adding new lines in the personal messages, we’ll make sure this doesn’t happen next year.

The amount of “Thank you”, “Keep up the great work” and similar positive messages are overwhelming and much appreciated.

We got suggestions regarding a more consistent UI for our apps and improvements on security, especially for Trust.

Some asked about device maintenance: “How long will this device be supported?” or “Could you put up a list of devices that will be maintained for a long time?”: this is something we aren’t capable of predicting, as that’s not how device maintenance works: each individual maintainer has a right to pull support for their device, be it for a broken feature / peripheral, lack of time to maintain, or anything else. When a device is pulled everything remains in place waiting for a new maintainer to carry it on.

We were also asked about why old builds are removed. The answer is that the mirrors we use are donated to us by external organizations and they have limited space - keeping old builds would require too much space. Additionally, we won’t distribute old, insecure, and potentially broken builds, as we don’t want users running abandonware-equivalent versions with no active updates.

Last but not least, a lot of people asked how to donate. You can look at the wiki page for information on how to do that.

The LineageOS team would like to extend our thanks to everyone who took their time to answer these questions. We look forward to hearing your feedback next year.