I don't have exact numbers, but I'm sure Graphene, Lineage, and all of the mods combined are much less than 1% of all android users; as well as these customers being less profitable than average as a marketing target.
Posting this from my lineage phone.
Yes. They have 99.9% of the mobile phones.
The phone was the end of open computing, the tech companies obtained an iron grip on the platform, this time with fully accepted total monitoring and data collection down to everything you say, hear, everywhere you go, and with smartwatch biosensors, everything you feel. The only thing left is to get smart glasses and they will know everything you see. Smell they can probably interpolate.
It happened over a decade ago, and that might as well be 100 years ago in modern attention spans. All the governments have to do is pay the companies money, or simply force-legislate, or threaten under the table for all that info, and for permanent forever access to active tracking and monitoring.
AI provides all the analysis they need to watch the firehose. It's all there.
At this point it doesn't matter if an alternative comes. It'll be such the minority, that the social graph will fill all the holes. And they can simply track your IMEI regardless from the towers, listen in with other nearby microphones/phones. There is no escape.
All that remains is for the key to be turned for worse-than-1984 authoritarianism. It's right there, ready for the AI-empowered 50% of consumption controlled, 90% of stocks owned oligarchy to use.
Open computing still exists. It's just overshadowed by the prevalence of locked mobile devices because those are convenient and good enough for the vast majority, who would rather use those than a less convenient desktop, laptop, or even raspberrypi.
Surveillance on the internet is challenging to avoid, but internet surveillance and tracking doesn't extend to (outside-of-browser) local compute.
I don't dispute that at all. I don't think it matters, it just needs to look like they're doing something to avoid forks and the like.
That said, there might be stuff that's actually using open source Android for profit. For example, the Nook Glowlight Plus, which runs a modded version of Android, doesn't appear to have any direct or even indirect references to Android anywhere (and I had to contribute a bit to the discourse to even get the rooting to work [1]). I have no ideas about the inner dealings of Barnes and Noble, but it wouldn't surprise me if they're running a completely forked version of FOSS Android and aren't paying a dime to Google for it.
I suspect these are the things that Google is trying to crack down on.
[1] https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=360563&pa...