Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Androids are the most commonly used smartphones. iOS, having been in the industry for much longer than Android, is expected to have more reliable apps. Given Apple’s diligently scrutinized apps development environment against Android’s free platform, one does expect the user experience to be better with iPhone apps. But, contrary to popular belief, studies by mobile apps monitoring startup, Crittercism, show that iPhone apps crash more often than Android apps.
On studying over a 200 million app launches, Crittercism found that iPhone apps are 3.5 times more likely to crash than Android apps. There could be a number of reasons for apps crashing on iPhone, both hardware-related and software-related. One of the most significant reasons is that most iPhone apps developers have not updated their software to work on Apple’s newest iPhone operating system iOS 5.1. But crashes are not very uncommon even with older versions of iOS; like iOS 4.1, iOS 4.2.1 and iOS 4.3.3. Crashes are significantly higher in the third quartile of apps when compared to the first and second. The first quartile of apps (the best and most used apps.) encountered a crash rate of 0.51% on iPhone as compared to 0.15% on android phones. That clearly illustrates the fact that app developers can make a huge difference by repeated testing and improving their apps quality. A reason for apps crashes could be the users not updating the software as well as their apps from time to time. In that case, Android app developers have an advantage that they can push auto updates and do not have to wait for the user to manually update them. Also Android allows developers to push updates instantly, which is much faster than on iOS where it might take up to a week. On the flip side, apple’s tight scrutiny and meticulous enforcement of HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) account for the high quality iOS apps in the appstore. Crittercism CEO Andrew Levy says that hardware issues like Internet usage, GPS, camera etc. could also be a reason why apps crash.
Situations are expected to change as Android’s new operating system, “Ice Cream Sandwich”(Android 4.0) launches. A new operating system could mean that Android apps might encounter more crashes. What is surprising is that the crash rates vary with different iOS devices. 74.41% of the iOS crashes happen on the iPhone, followed by 14.81% on the iPod touch and 10.72% on the iPad.
There are things you can do to help with the crashes. Firstly you can update the firmware on your iPhone and make sure that you have updated firmware. Restarting your iPhone could also help. But most of the time, your app. crashes because it needs to be updated and hence you must keep your apps updated. As mobile apps become more and more important and widely used, it becomes all the more important for both the developers and users that their apps don’t crash very often.