Can we get stats on the most popular OpenWrt devices?

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When shopping for something like an OpenWRT device, one of my main factors is how popular a device is. My reason is I'm trying to figure out how well supported it is - which is hard to measure objectively, but number of users is a good proxy for it. If a device is very unstable, not a lot of people will use it.

Does the download infrastructure for OpenWRT images allow for download stats? There are firmware images on the wiki:

Another way to do this would be analytics from the device itself. But I suspect few people will enable it, and I suspect devs wouldn't want to force it on. As a user I wouldn't want to run such a thing. Maybe if it was a one-time ping.

Can the update infrastructure have analytics?

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One problem with gauging popularity is all the private forks of OpenWRT. Companies like Ubiquiti and FriendlyARM fork OpenWRT and there wouldn't be any direct stats from that. But it's kind of out of scope for the question - what devices are popular for vanilla OpenWRT? (I know the answers people typically give: r7800, wrt3200acm, archer c7, but that's just what's popular with forum enthusiasts, and doesn't cover every use case.)

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The short answer is 'no'.

OpenWrt doesn't do any kind of runtime telemetry.

…and the download stats from the servers are close to useless.

  • there are over half a dozen mirrors
  • they're heavily skewed towards modern popular devices, e.g. the rt3200, not just because of device proliferation among the user base, but also because their users tend to lean heavily towards the enthusiast side (many snapshot/ auc users, upgrading their device very often, as in weekly or more often)
  • they're also heavily skewed towards popular old devices, which might still be plenty, but hardly recommended for new purchases
  • previous checks of the download statistics have shown bots gaming the stats, as in downloading tl-wr1043ndv1 images incredibly often (probably as some kind of hostile internet metric of their own)
    EDIT: just as an example for this TL-WR1043ND snapshot images - High download numbers - Spanish users needed
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That still leaves this:

Another way to do this would be analytics from the device itself. But I suspect few people will enable it, and I suspect devs wouldn't want to force it on. As a user I wouldn't want to run such a thing. Maybe if it was a one-time ping.

Is there any interest in an opt-in one-time ping with the device model?

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There was some discussion some years ago. You see the result today.

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You can get some statistics from https://sysupgrade.openwrt.org/stats ie:
https://sysupgrade.openwrt.org/stats/d/LM1HE4E7k/attended-sysupgrade-server?orgId=1&refresh=1m

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