Pattern lock is easier to shoulder surf than a PIN or passphrase but that isn't why it was removed. It was removed because it unnecessarily restricts the complexity of the lock method for no good reason along with strongly encouraging making an incredibly weak lock method and feeling secure anyway.

Samsung doesn't currently provide proper alternate OS support, which leads to many of the requirements at grapheneos.org/faq#future-d... not being provided by them for an alternate OS. They have nearly everything required but don't allow us to actually make use of a lot of it, only the stock OS.

@grapheneos.org
Then in theory key number lock can also be spotted, I don't get the logic of removing pattern lock.
And as the user have a choice of not having any kind of lock they also should get the choice to have pattern lock that might be less secure than numbers and much safer than non

Hey why, how you doing?
Why I'm not getting invitation codes?