iOS apps crash more often than Android apps, study shows

[pezz]

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%.

http://www.gsmarena.com/ios_apps_cra...-news-3769.php

[Cultus]

I have to agree. I experience more apps closing unexpectedly on my iPhone and iPad than I do on my SGSII. I think the difference is with iOS the app just quits suddenly, so the user is probably not even cognizant that the app just crashed. Where as with Android you get the pop up message and the option to force close the app, so right away the user knows that the app just crashed. Apple simply disguises the fact that the app crashed. But from my personal experience this is indeed true. iOS apps crash more often than Android apps.

[noreik23]

That's why me haffi rate gsmarena so much...They are totally unbiased and always reveal the truth in their posts!

Another win for Android!!!

[pezz]

[Technoboy]

I was just coming to post this but somehow I expected pezz to post it first. LOL.

[NOKIA 3650]

so the user is probably not even cognizant that the app just crashed

The good thing to note is that since the app is still running in a sandboxed environment so "it crashing" doesn't affect the rest of iOS unlike Android that has its various dependencies for some apps.

[Skele Drew]

The good thing to note is that since the app is still running in a sandboxed environment so "it crashing" doesn't affect the rest of iOS unlike Android that has its various dependencies for some apps.

So wrong again. Android apps all run in a their own VMs, so no app affects the other. Theoretically IMO this would happen if an app running as SU crashes while accessing another app's data, but I've yet to hear of that happening.

EDIT: And YAY! for crApple "User Experience". I guess they are successful in giving better experience on crashes since the user has no idea what happened and if it was their fault or not . I guess Android gives inferior "UE" by telling the user that something just went wrong and giving them the chance to do something about it .

[NOKIA 3650]

How do the apps interact with on another on Android then?
For example, when you purchase the "key" application for Documents to go, how does it update the "trial" copy of documents to go to ensure that it is updated?
If you deleted the "key" application, then DocstoGo reverts to the trial edition.
There are times I close base Google apps on my Nexus S and it cripples other apps that depend on it from functioning (or is it because I rooted differently).

since the user has no idea what happened and if it was their fault or not

Since its assumed that iOS device single-tasks (or freezes one app while switching to another), it can't be the user's fault as the app either runs out of memory (most common in older devices) or due to logical / syntax errors during programming.

On another note, my experience will be vastly different from that of Cultus as my iPad2 isn't jailbroken (I have no interest in doing it). And I have lots of available storage space, as opposed to my iPad1 which only had 16GB of storage, 128MB RAM and was only a single core processor. I'll say the same too about my Nexus S vs my bricked Vibrant although they should be nearly identical in spec while attempting to run ICS smoothly as a daily driver.

It's unfair to look at one OS as opposed to another and say it crashes more under uneven circumstances. With that said, I'm still wondering why people still run Windows in this day and age in mission critical environments.

[pezz]

It's unfair to look at one OS as opposed to another and say it crashes more under uneven circumstances. With that said, I'm still wondering why people still run Windows in this day and age in mission critical environments.

Oh so a few months ago when you were saying android crashes more. It was fair?

Blah blah tell it to someone who cares. Fact is IOS crashes more... end of story.

[NOKIA 3650]

Oh so a few months ago when you were saying android crashes more. It was fair?

I never said such a thing in any thread. Don't think that because my signature says "Apple is still the best thing since sliced bread" mean that I actually live by it. Remember that I have the Nexus as my primary phone and the Vibrant as a paperweight currently being worked on.

Fact is IOS crashes more... end of story.

This seems so childish. This article doesn't clearly state what tests were done, so all those charts are meaningless. without a clear description of what was tested.

I can easily say that Android ported games aren't as "pretty" as those released on iOS, but I'd have to give you evidence to backup my claim.