I think Moto is lowballing how many people mod their phones...

[czerdrill]

I'd really love to see real numbers. The community is "small" compared to the entire android market but I bet it's more people than you think.

At work (Network Admins), we have a few more android users (10) than iPhone users (6) - but guess what, every android phone is at least rooted and most are trying new roms about every other day.

This may be because we're IT people who are more inclined to root our phones. Don't use the forums as a measuring stick though - I'm one of ten at work that actually use forums. The other 90% don't. Extrapolate from there and you've got some hefty numbers.

If you peeked my above link has some real numbers, but just one location.

I think that even those who don't use forums are being exposed to rooting information. Blogs cover it. Even the news covers it. With the recent announcement that the Droid - X has been rooted you gotta wonder if Moto didn't know it eventually would be.

Look at all the press they got about the eFuse. Before that there was a little press on locked bootloaders. Now there will be more press about how the phone was hacked and that folks can customize it. suddenly those who didn't know what rooting was are thinking "what is this"?

Then someone who is rooted sees their phone and asks if they are or not. And we grow.

Yet, the rooting community will NEVER eclipse the normal community or even get anywhere remotely close. i have friends who say they bought the incredible because "well, it's incredible and it has a touch screen!!" (their words not mine)...those are the majority of people who own these phones, not rooters and hackers. its cool to say the android owners are more sophisticated than iphone owners but they're really not. they fall for the marketing (incredible!!!) just as badly as the iphone fanboys fall for apple marketing.

we are small. we can grow, but we'll never grow enough lol

 

[christim]

i have friends who say they bought the incredible because "well, it's incredible and it has a touch screen!!" (their words not mine)...those are the majority of people

we are small. we can grow, but we'll never grow enough lol

"I want the Inc Phone...I don't care!"

 

[czerdrill]

i have friends who say they bought the incredible because "well, it's incredible and it has a touch screen!!" (their words not mine)...those are the majority of people

we are small. we can grow, but we'll never grow enough lol

"I want the Inc Phone...I don't care!"

haha yeah exactly...my wife asked my friend who has an incredible what makes it better then the droid 1 and he honestly said "umm you can download apps on it, ummm it has bright colors on the screen" haha...you gotta give it up to verizon, they really had some good marketing with the android phones

 

[takeshi]

For example, SetCPU has 50k-250k downloads and has been there for months so I'm guessing it's closer to 250k.

How exactly are downloads counted? If I download SetCPU again or to another Android device is it counted multiple times even though I'm only one person? Are downloads of updates also counted? If so, I'd be counted quite a few times. You can't rely on numbers unless you completely understand how they're collected.

 

[jsh1120]

According to Eric Schmidt, approximately four million android devices are being activated per month. That makes the rooting community a very small drop in a very large bucket no matter how downloads of various apps are counted.

 

[czerdrill]

According to Eric Schmidt, approximately four million android devices are being activated per month. That makes the rooting community a very small drop in a very large bucket no matter how downloads of various apps are counted.

and that makes the people on DF.net who actually hack even smaller drops in even larger buckets. i'd say we're not even 1/4 of one percent of total users.

 

[velocity92c]

There were forty THOUSAND downloads of petes BB 0.4 froyo rom in the first WEEK. And that's just one rom. in 7 days time. The hacking community is much bigger than any of you are giving it credit, lol. One fourth of one percent? Give me a break. You mean to tell me that one out of every 4 hundred android users will mod their phone? That's a terrible estimate. I know people like to look cool, and don't want stuff going mainstream, but some of you are ridiculous with these numbers. 40k in one week for ONE rom for ONE phone. There are tons of roms and phones out there. Do some math.

 

[czerdrill]

There were forty THOUSAND downloads of petes BB 0.4 froyo rom in the first WEEK. And that's just one rom. in 7 days time. The hacking community is much bigger than any of you are giving it credit, lol. One fourth of one percent? Give me a break. You mean to tell me that one out of every 4 hundred android users will mod their phone? That's a terrible estimate. I know people like to look cool, and don't want stuff going mainstream, but some of you are ridiculous with these numbers. 40k in one week for ONE rom for ONE phone. There are tons of roms and phones out there. Do some math.

...ok...let's take this one step at a time.

I hope you're not trying to convince me that 40,000 people downloaded pete's rom, and then a different 40,000 downloaded cyanogen's, and a whole new set of 40,000 downloaded BD's etc...cuz obviously that's not true. if those 40,000 are unique downloads (which I highly doubt), they're probably the same 40,000 people who are downloading the other ROMs. I really hope you're not saying that hundreds of thousands of users are downloading ROMs as we speak...because that could be the dumbest thing I ever heard.

secondly, as i mentioned the question of unique downloads. sure pete got 40,000 downloads, but are they unique downloads or are they the same people downloading multiple times? i know i've downloaded ROMs several times (the same ROM) as I switch back and forth and test. I don't save them on my computer and often redownload them, and any download tracker would count that as a download.

now let's give you the benefit of the doubt (even though you're wrong) that it is 40,000 unique people downloading pete's ROMs...Since we're wildly assuming things, let's take Google's announcement that 160,000 android devices are sold/activate every day. That would equate to 58M units sold a year (again we're wildly assuming things like you've done)...40,000 modders out of 58,000,000 still equals .07% of the total users. So i guess you're right...saying it's 1/4 of 1% (.0025) was WAYY OFF because it's actually .07% (Please forgive me for this egregious math error :| )

even if we just go with current figures, i believe it's 8.5 million units sold since the end of June 2010...40,000 of 8.5M is .47%...yeah.

i'm not going to entertain the notion that there are hundreds of thousands of people modding their phone, because if you dont see the ridiculousness in that, then i dont know what to tell you...you asked me to do some math...now i ask you to use some common sense.

 

[kodiak799]

Don't know if we'll ever find a satisfactory answer.

I think the number of rooted users might be higher than 1%, perhaps as high as 5% (I think most tech savvy people would, eventually, and particularly IT folks - those groups probably easily make-up over 5% of the population for smartphones). Also, I wonder how many rooted to run some root-only apps but don't flash roms? That number is probably also higher than we realize.

Anyway, put me down for about 2%. And just thought of something interesting: Moto locks down the X, gets a lot of press, and then suprisingly it's rooted within a week, getting more press. Hmmmm.....

 

[deputc26]

Regardless of what percentage rooters make up, we are still important from a business standpoint because we are opinion leaders.

When friends of mine are going to buy a piece of technology they often consult me on it because they know I follow technology. After buying my laptop a couple years ago on purely price/performance grounds, no less than 7 of my friends bough identical laptops in the following months after consulting me and expressing that price/performance was their primary criteria. Same thing with smartphones, most of the people on this forum are probably opinion leaders and so their impact on the market is significantly greater than the average user's.

Who writes reviews? who tests and ranks? who reccomends apps? We do. We are the industry's opinion leaders.

Google Image Result for http://www.advocacyinteractive.com/images/oplead.jpg

 

[czerdrill]

Don't know if we'll ever find a satisfactory answer.

I think the number of rooted users might be higher than 1%, perhaps as high as 5% (I think most tech savvy people would, eventually, and particularly IT folks - those groups probably easily make-up over 5% of the population for smartphones). Also, I wonder how many rooted to run some root-only apps but don't flash roms? That number is probably also higher than we realize.

Anyway, put me down for about 2%. And just thought of something interesting: Moto locks down the X, gets a lot of press, and then suprisingly it's rooted within a week, getting more press. Hmmmm.....

as more units are sold that 2% becomes lower and lower. if Google's numbers are accurate and 4 million+ units are being sold a month, 2% of that is 80,000, which is definitely possible, but I'm positive the number of rooters is not rising exponentially as the number of units sold are. like i mentioned in another thread, verizon did an amazing job with marketing this droid stuff. you've got people who have no idea about anything going out and buying android phones because "it's incredible!" or "droid does". most of the consumers are mindless masses who just buy a phone off the hype rather than researching. so overall, I still go with the belief that it's under 1% for all android units sold but again, who the heck knows and honestly who cares haha dancedroiddancedroiddancedroid

 

[OneTenderRebel]

There were forty THOUSAND downloads of petes BB 0.4 froyo rom in the first WEEK. And that's just one rom. in 7 days time. The hacking community is much bigger than any of you are giving it credit, lol. One fourth of one percent? Give me a break. You mean to tell me that one out of every 4 hundred android users will mod their phone? That's a terrible estimate. I know people like to look cool, and don't want stuff going mainstream, but some of you are ridiculous with these numbers. 40k in one week for ONE rom for ONE phone. There are tons of roms and phones out there. Do some math.

Absolutely no chance 40k downloaded BB in a week. Where did you pull that number from???

 

[czerdrill]

Regardless of what percentage rooters make up, we are still important from a business standpoint because we are opinion leaders.

When friends of mine are going to buy a piece of technology they often consult me on it because they know I follow technology. After buying my laptop a couple years ago on purely price/performance grounds, no less than 7 of my friends bough identical laptops in the following months after consulting me and expressing that price/performance was their primary criteria. Same thing with smartphones, most of the people on this forum are probably opinion leaders and so their impact on the market is significantly greater than the average user's.

Who writes reviews? who tests and ranks? who reccomends apps? We do. We are the industry's opinion leaders.

this is true, but i'd be careful to not place too much importance on our position. there is no doubt that forums, blogs, articles are all consulted by the big companies when they create products or try to ascertain what the consumer wants. but a company is not going to choose a customer's wants over their own profits (unless they don't plan to be in business for too long)...

we are the opinion leaders once a phone is released, yes, but definitely not the leaders when it comes to that meeting where motorola/verizon are deciding what next to offer. if we were there wouldn't be talk of tiered plans, there wouldnt be encrypted bootloaders, there wouldn't be talk about being charged for tethering.

most people who buy android devices buy it because of the commercial and because its the newest thing (no different from iphone owners)...sad but true

 

[czerdrill]

There were forty THOUSAND downloads of petes BB 0.4 froyo rom in the first WEEK. And that's just one rom. in 7 days time. The hacking community is much bigger than any of you are giving it credit, lol. One fourth of one percent? Give me a break. You mean to tell me that one out of every 4 hundred android users will mod their phone? That's a terrible estimate. I know people like to look cool, and don't want stuff going mainstream, but some of you are ridiculous with these numbers. 40k in one week for ONE rom for ONE phone. There are tons of roms and phones out there. Do some math.

Absolutely no chance 40k downloaded BB in a week. Where did you pull that number from???

true or not, it is an insignificant number overall and further proves the point that we are not any big part of the android community...i'm not impressed by 40 thousand in one week, when units are being sold at the rate of 160,000/day.

 

[OneTenderRebel]

There were forty THOUSAND downloads of petes BB 0.4 froyo rom in the first WEEK. And that's just one rom. in 7 days time. The hacking community is much bigger than any of you are giving it credit, lol. One fourth of one percent? Give me a break. You mean to tell me that one out of every 4 hundred android users will mod their phone? That's a terrible estimate. I know people like to look cool, and don't want stuff going mainstream, but some of you are ridiculous with these numbers. 40k in one week for ONE rom for ONE phone. There are tons of roms and phones out there. Do some math.

Absolutely no chance 40k downloaded BB in a week. Where did you pull that number from???

true or not, it is an insignificant number overall and further proves the point that we are not any big part of the android community...i'm not impressed by 40 thousand in one week, when units are being sold at the rate of 160,000/day.

agreed, I have always thought and said the rooted community makes up less than 1% of the smartphone community and that number may be the same for just android phones as well. I would be absoutely shocked if us rooted users were anymore than 1-2% of all android phones.