iOS Apps Found to Crash More Often Than Android Apps

iOS apps crash more often than Android apps with iOS 5.0.1 being the worst firmware for crashes, according to a Forbes report based on data from Crittercism.

The largest proportion of app crashes from both iOS and Android platforms were on iOS 5.01 with 28.64% of overall crashes (in a normalized data set). That makes sense since iOS 5 was still relatively new at that time and many apps still need to work out the kinks with the new OS. But there are also older iOS versions that have a significant proportion of app crashes. For example, iOS 4.2.10 had 12.64% of app crashes, iOS 4.3.3 had 10.66% and iOS 4.1 had 8.24%. One other point that this made clear to me is that many people apparently take their time updating their iPhone software or never update it at all.

It's unclear why iOS saw more crashes than Android; especially since Android is running on a wider variety of hardware and has released more versions of its operating system. According to the data, there were at least 23 different iOS operating systems on which apps had crashed and 33 Android operating systems on which apps had crashed. Crittercism CEO Andrew Levy said, "It can be a mix of both hardware and software issues that developers may or may not be responding to."

One possible explanation is that iOS developers can't fix bugs quickly due to Apple's approval process. Often it takes at least a week for an update to be approved. Even an emergency request takes about two days. This is often devastating for developers who rack up negative publicity as they wait for their update to go out to customers. With Android, developers can fix issues that come up and immediately seed the new version.

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