I installed CyanogenMod after the CarrierIQ story broke. It wasn't trivial but there were good instructions for my exact model of phone. CyanogenMod is an improvement over the stock HTC Sense-based firmware: more customizable, better battery life, no crapware that you can't remove. Not a life-changer, but probably worth doing if you're curious.

The one exception is the keyboard. The previous keyboards I had used were the iOS keyboards when I had an iPod Touch, and the Sense keyboard from when I bought my phone to when I installed Cyanogenmod. The stock Android keyboard was shockingly bad. I installed SwiftKey, but it's still not quite as good as the Sense keyboard.

CyanogenMod has the potential becoming the Ubuntu/Fedora of Android world; if only boot unlocking went maintstream.

I know this is only vaguely related, but another "Android Installations" figure that surprised me the other day was when I saw that Orbot has over 100,000 installations:

https://market.android.com/details?id=org.torproject.android

Who'd have thought that over 100,000 people would even have Tor installed, let alone on their phones!

I suspect a good portion of those installs are for doing things like getting amazons free app of the day outside the US.

I've seen no evidence to suggest that

Congratulations- it's well deserved. My first Android phone was a Nexus One, and I loved the CyanogenMod improvements that came with every release.

I made the mistake of upgrading to a Galaxy S2 Skyrocket (I mean, really?) and quickly found out that the non-Nexus world of Android is very depressing. I hated TouchWiz, and I couldn't put CyanogenMod on my new phone. I returned it.

It seems like only in 7.1 have they added features that were on SGS2 since the beginning.

And actually, were it not for these stupid blue gradients on scrolling (that appeared in recent update), I find TouchWiz perfect.

Cyanogenmod Settings > Interface > Overscoll effect.

Edge Glow is the gradients, Bounce is an iOS like behaviour, or you can just turn it all off like stock Android.

The blue gradiants are an Android feature (at least - the overscroll behavior is).

Does the CM stats page only record those who allow anonymous statistics to be collected? If so surely the actual number of installations is much higher

Your question is answered in the second paragraph of the article... The answer is yes.

" when users first install the custom firmware they are prompted with a notification asking them to opt-in"

Sounds like it is only including those who opt-in. That would indeed seem to indicate that the actual number is higher.

I installed CM 7.1 for my Vibrant phone quite easily following the instructions, but it lacked two features which were very important to me. One was taking calls through wired headphone. My stock vibrant software worked quite well for taking calls through headphone but CM didn't work at all. There were bug reports raised for this issue but it was not fixed. Another small feature I missed badly was the lack of recently added playlist which I use to listen to songs which are new without searching or making a playlist of them. This playlist was available on stock player but was not working correctly. I hoped to wait for these issues to be fixed, but I came to know that Samsung Vibrant will not be supported by CM because of a 911 issue. So I had to go back to stock Samsung version with less battery life and crapware.

As an aside the guy who founded and still leads the CyanogenMod project now works for Samsung on their Android distribution(/flavor).

I'm not sure whether they hired him to try to let the steam out of Cyanogen but if so it certainly hasn't achieved that.

An interesting side-effect is that they have enough users to make it worthwhile to start their own app store, as explained by Koushik Dutta, the guy behind Clockwork Recovery (a custom ROM used as a trampoline to installing and upgrading Cyanogen) and active contributor to Cyanogen: https://plus.google.com/103583939320326217147/posts/ViJ665K3...

I use CM variations on 2 of my Android phones (in the family) and I'm considering putting it on a 3rd one we just bought.