CyanogenMod is said to have far fewer users than Cyanogen Inc. claimed

CyanogenMod and Cyanogen OS are said to have far fewer users than the company behind both Android releases has claimed in the past. While the company was talking about tens of millions of users, it would be several million.

CyanogenMod and Cyanogen OS together would be active on two to three million devices, according to tech site The Information, based on internal data from the company. This concerns devices that were active in the week before and that are running a version of the operating system from early 2015 or later. Steve Kondik, creator of CyanogenMod and founder of Cyanogen, claimed four million users for Cyanogen OS alone. Until last year, Cyanogen spoke of tens of millions of users, up to fifty million.

In addition, Kondik notes that keeping track of CyanogenMod’s users is difficult, as many of them are privacy-oriented and thus disable features to allow the software to contact Cyanogen servers. That way, only downloads show that people are using the software.

The number of users is important, as Cyanogen OS currently relies on investors and has to show how the number of installations of its software is doing. CyanogenMod is an alternative firmware for existing devices that users have to install themselves, while Cyanogen OS is an operating system based on Android that comes pre-installed on devices.