Survey reveals iOS apps more unstable than Android apps
According to a survey from Crittercism, an app analyst, Android apps are actually more stable compared to iOS apps.
Crash reports from both platforms were surveyed for fifteen days, which launched on the start of December of last year. Data was gathered from 33 versions of Google’s Android and 23 versions of Apple’s iOS.
In first place iOS 5.01 accounted for 28.64 of crashes. iOS 4.2.1 accounts for 12.64% of crashes, and 10.66% was the iOS 4.3.3. As a whole, iOS accounts for 75% of crashes surveyed.
Why did the iOS 5.01 crash so much? At the time the survey was conducted, iOS 5.01, released for devices such as the iPhone 4s and iPad 2, has just been released. Like all new releases, bugs are expected.
In response to the survey, Electricpig said, “Though overall Android apps appear to be more stable on average (Crittercism also compared by crashes to launches, not just crashes, removing the potential skew of more iPhones being tested), the ‘best’ or most stable apps, those in the top quartile, for Android actually crashed more than those in the top quartile for iPhone.
“That suggests a level of polish is being applied to the very best iPhone apps that Android ones do not receive, but also that there’s an awful lot of poorly coded iPhone apps lurking within the depths of the App Store too – even more than on the Android Market.”
Forbes’ Tomio Geron said, “This can be due to hardware issues, such as the use of location or GPS services or cameras; it could be due to the Internet connection, that is, how a phone connects to 3G or WiFi, or that the device is not connected to the Internet at a certain moment, or that something happens during the switch between 3G and WiFi. There could also be issues with language support on certain devices. There can also be memory problems if an app uses too much memory.
“Problems can also occur with third-party services that developers use in their apps, from analytics to advertising systems. For example, there were reports that Apple’s iAds system gave some developers problems if they did not adhere to certain standards.
“Developers also constantly create new updates to their apps to create new features or fix bugs. But again, people often don’t update their apps-just as they don’t update their operating system. (Android, unlike iOS, allows users to auto-update their apps, which can eliminate some of the problems.) So developers often test all previous versions of their apps with each version of the different operating systems.”
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