iOS apps crash more than Android apps

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mercurial

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iOS apps crash more often than Android apps, study shows

In this episode of smartphone myth busters, we'll investigate the claim that Android apps are often released to the market unstable, whereas iOS apps are always bug-free and buttery smooth.

According to a study by Crittercism, quoted by Forbes, both platforms have their share of apps that crash and, if anything, the iOS ones do so more often. The company which specializes in providing real-time crash reports for mobile apps evaluated reports over a period of one month and found that iOS apps crash quite a lot more than their Android counterparts.

In the first of the three quartiles we got data for, iOS apps crashed after 0.51% of all launches, whereas Android apps only crashed in 0.15%. In the second quartile the picture is similar with iOS apps crashing in 1.47% of the cases, whereas Android apps did so 0.73% of the time. Things are much closer in the third quartile - 2.97% crashes for Android vs 3.66% for iOS.

Crittercism even gave us a detailed breakdown of the most problematic releases by OS. As it turns out, iOS 5.0.1 generates more than a third of all iOS crashes - 33.93%, while iOS 4.3.5 is the second most problematic with 10.62%. That sounds quite believable as these two software versions are the two latest releases of iOS4 and iOS5.

On Android, it's the two Gingerbread releases that generated most of the trouble - 2.3.3 with 24.76% and 2.3.4 with 23.38%.

Of course, those are the most popular releases of each platform, so it's only logical that they will generate the most crashes.

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Still, the study warns against making hasty conclusions - despite what the data might show at the moment, iOS isn't a worse system for making more apps crash. It's just that Apple introduced iOS 5 relatively soon, made it available to a lot of devices simultaneously and is still working to fix its issues on all of them. The scales might tip the other way once Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich updates start hitting more devices.

What the study was bound to show is that every OS has its more stable and its buggier releases and there's a good portion of apps everywhere that don't behave as they should. Now can we put that debate to sleep, please?
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Source
 
the lengths some must go to justify their handset's os choices.
 
Pr⊕phet said:
the lengths some must go to justify their handset's os choices.
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True, but as a developer, well more a person that support apps on both platforms I find this report rather bizarre.

1st off seeing that Android is "fragmented".
2nd that there are more Android users than iOS.
3rd, Most of my support tickets was Android based but then I dont know how many Apple catch vs Google that doesn't support jack <swearword>. Example if my app doesn't install iPhone users 1st go to Apple and then to me where as Android users only have one place to complain. and that's the developer email link in the app store.

Edit: OK after some reading(Also looked at our tickets) and thinking, I think I found the reason for this. The answer is in the SDK or that is my view. On Android we never test applications on older phones as we learned that if we dont use the new API's we dont need to and 80%+ of our Apple support tickets are closed when people update their phones. I dont do the Apple development but I suspect that they change API's that cause this problem.
 
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This has been my experience as well - I have not found iOS to be particularly stable.
 
No crashes here. I can open, navigate and close every app on my phone one after the other with no hickups. I know 2 people with droids that need to restart their phones at least once while trying to do the same on their droids.
 
I've heard that the crash reporting app on droid devices regularly crashes hence the stats... :p
 
I had more crashes on my iPad than on my SGS2. But then again, I got more on my original SGS than on the iPad. Probably depends on what you use. Would have though Android would be worse as they have lower spec'ed devices.
 
unskinnybob said:
No crashes here. I can open, navigate and close every app on my phone one after the other with no hickups. I know 2 people with droids that need to restart their phones at least once while trying to do the same on their droids.
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You should tell the 2 people to either take their phones back or stop pirating. I have yet to reboot any of my Android devices for any software reason what so ever.

Only time I reboot them is when I flash new ROM's
 
My apps on iOS crash every now and then but it really doesn't bother me as they always start back up where I left off... I have never... ever... had to restart my iPhone though.
 
Is this a good time to point out the in terms of OS stability, WP7 would probably win.
And secondly, this is an absolutely pointless study. If they were comparing apps 1:1 across each platform them maybe, but half the crashes on one OS could be attributed to apps that aren't even available cross platform...
 
Roguemat, absolutely agree on your point 2, adding even the same apps 1:1 written for OS 2.0 could have unforeseen issues in OS release 3.0 as most people have already pointed out.

Your point 1 regarding WP7 however...perhaps good idea to don the flame suit...
 
Elimentals said:
I have yet to reboot any of my Android devices for any software reason what so ever.
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I haven't had to do it physically either: my Android device has rebooted for software reasons all by itself. :p
 
This ios thingy seem to be nice project. If they can iron out the rough edges and get it stable, I'm sure the users will appreciate it a lot.
 
It depends on too many variables like how many apps run together, how long the apps run before it crashes and how patient the user is (give the apps enough time to load and react etc) - to name a few.
 
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