[RFC] Privacy-preserving OpenWrt ecosystem usage statistics

[Dharmik Parmar]

Hi all,

I was looking into whether OpenWrt has any public data about active devices, popular targets, or commonly used packages. I found older discussions around usage statistics, including the Hamburg 2019 notes and later mailing-list comments suggesting passive sources such as download stats, forum activity, and issue data.

I understand that an on-device opt-in package is probably not ideal for OpenWrt: it would be biased toward power users, would not work well on storage-constrained devices, and would raise understandable privacy concerns.

Would there be interest in a privacy-preserving public metrics dashboard based only on existing server-side signals, for example:
- firmware image downloads by release/target/profile
- package index refreshes by release/arch
- package file download aggregates
- Firmware Selector / ASU build requests
- popular ASU device profiles and package selections

The dashboard would not claim to measure “active OpenWrt installs.” A better label may be “observed OpenWrt ecosystem activity.” Raw IPs or user-identifying data should not be published or retained; only aggregate counters should be exposed, with small-count suppression where needed.

This could help answer practical project questions such as:
- Which targets and device profiles are still actively used?
- Which releases are still seeing activity?
- Which LuCI apps or packages appear to have users?
- How significant are tiny/storage-constrained devices today?
- Which packages are commonly requested in custom images?

I’m interested in helping prototype the public dashboard side if maintainers think this direction is acceptable. The main thing I’d like to understand is whether anonymized aggregate data from existing infrastructure could ever be made available, and what privacy/security constraints would be required.

Regards,
Dharmik