Crittercism has recently conducted a study that has surprisingly revealed that Android is much more stable compared to iOS. According to the study, software applications for iOS crash more often than those for the highly popular Android operating system. Many experts believe that iOS 5 is the main reason for this statistic as the most number of crashes are reportedly from devices running this particular firmware.
Google, on the other hand, is riding high on the Ice Cream Sandwich update which further improves the performance and overall look of the OS. It also reportedly suffers the least number of crashes based on data sourced from popular applications on the platform, though admittedly the sample size for this statistic is miniscule compared to iOS 5. The ICS update is presently available for only a few smartphones and major companies like HTC, Samsung and Motorola are expected to release the update for their smartphones some time later this year.
The study by Crittercism was conducted from data collected from over 214 million application initializations (essentially, 214 million reports from running applications) till late 2011. The application crashes were analyzed by Crittercism as a percentage of each app launch. They tested over 162 million application launches for iOS which is significantly larger than the 52 million Android app launches in the same period of time. It was found that Android 2.3.4 (Gingerbread) was the most stable and resulted in only 3.7% of crashes, whereas the older Android 2.3.3 was responsible for 2.4%.
Apple’s iOS performed abysmally and the latest version iOS 5.01 was accountable for 29% of all crashes. Older versions like iOS 4.4.4 and 4.2.10 accounted for 11% and 13% of the crashes, respectively. Reports from the top quartile of applications provided the most shocking result, showing that iOS crashed more than 50% of the time at application launch compared to Android’s meager 0.15%.
Crittercism CEO Andrew Levy believes that Apple devices suffered a higher percentage of crashes as the latest iOS version 5.01 is quite new and has not been tested thoroughly. Another plausible reason is that there might be difficulties in coding for iOS 5 due to stringent Apple-imposed standards for their custom mobile ad platform. Apple plans to release an update soon which is expected to fix most of the problems associated with the previous version. It is also speculated that when the latest ICS update becomes available to a majority of Android devices the statistics may even out as ICS is currently on very few devices.
