1. Decline of LineageOS’s mainstream appeal
The community notes a clear shift away from LineageOS as the default custom ROM, with many users moving to alternatives such as Evolution X, GrapheneOS, or unofficial forks.
"Wow LineageOS really is a bazaar, and not a cathedral." – pavon
"The LineageOS teams refuses to incorporate patches to support MicroG... requiring unofficial builds." – dahrkael
"Nowadays most devices can't be bootloader unlocked at all... developers cannot develop ROMs as they cannot get on the phones anyway." – aguyongithub
2. Majority of installs are unofficial and often non‑phone devices
Recent statistics show that 74 % of LineageOS installations are unofficial builds, and roughly two‑thirds of U.S. installs occur on emulators or non‑phone hardware (Waydroid, Switch, Raspberry Pi, etc.).
"74 % of installs are unofficial builds, not ones released by LineageOS." – pavon (bullet list)
"Some Waydroid installations are on phones." – seba_dos1
"To get to 2/3 of US installs, you have to sum all this stuff up including waydroid_arm64." – seba_dos1
3. Growing technical and policy barriers
Users point out tighter bootloader locks, Play Integrity requirements, and the need for signature spoofing as reasons why custom ROM adoption is shrinking.
"Now that manufacturers support their devices for 5+ years and ROMs are actually quite usable out of the box, the need for custom ROMs is much lower." – jeroenhd
"Anti‑competitive practices from Google (Play Integrity, more and more features locked behind closed source binaries instead of AOSP) and manufacturer locking the bootloaders much more than in the past." – realusername
"I believe a lot of the enthusiasm we had at the start of the smartphone age is also now gone." – Ampersander