Which Crashes More? Apple Apps or Android Apps?

A new report from the crash report analytics company Crittercism indicates that iOS apps tend to crash more than Android apps. But are the numbers truly indicative of an Apple issue, or are they typical of what one might see in the app landscape shortly after a major iOS release?

Crittercism's crash survey analyzed more than 214 million different app launches between November and December of 2011 to determine the source of most app crashes. And, in doing so, the company came up with the statistic that more iOS apps crashed versus Android apps by around 162 million to 52 million – basically, three times as many iOS crashes.

But here's the interesting part: Crittercism's analysis took place just a few weeks after the launch of a major iteration to Apple's mobile operating system, iOS 5, and during the release of the incremental upgrade iOS

5.0.1. Go figure, then, that the company's analysis of app crashes between December 1 and December 15 of 2011 indicates that crashes for apps installed on both iOS 5 and iOS 5.0.1 make up 32 percent of all recorded app problems.

"I expect as Ice Cream Sandwich just launched and the new Nexus S phone launched (during the study), we'll expect the same situation to occur (with Android) as what happened (with iOS)," said Crittercism CEO Andrew Levy in an interview with Forbes.

The numbers get even more eye-opening when you split up the apps Crittercism analyzed by their popularity. In what Crittercism calls the "first quartile" of apps, Android users only experience crashes roughly 0.15 percent the time for each app launched – far less than half of the 0.51 percent of Apple apps that crash for every app launched. The gulf narrows a bit for "second quartile" apps – Android jumps up to 0.73 percent to Apple's 1.47 percent. And by the time we reach Crittercism's "third quartile" apps, Android is up to 2.97 percent to Apple's 3.66 percent.

Users of Android 2.3.3 and 2.3.4 experienced the most app crashes on Crittercism's analysis (24.76 and 23.38 percent, respectively). As noted earlier, iOS 5.0.1 contributes to the greatest number of crashes on iOS of any variant of the operating system (33.93 percent).

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