Crittercism shows app crash comparison

Crittercism has conducted a rare study of app stability that implied iOS apps might crash more than Android versions, although raising questions. Covering the top three quarters of popular apps downloaded in the first half of December, it found that iOS apps were slightly if noticeably more likely to crash. The relative gap diminished as researchers delved into less popular titles, although the sheer number of apps that crashed went up.

About three quarters (74.4 percent) of iOS crashes were on iPhones, where 14.9 percent were on iPods and 10.7 percent on iPads.

The data didn't necessarily indicate that iOS was unstable, however. About 28.6 percent of all app crashes, and 33.9 percent of iOS devices, were using iOS 5.0.1, a release that had just come out less than a month before the tracking period began. App developers would have had less time to test against the new release.

Android 4.0 and the Galaxy Nexus had reached the US only just as the test period ended and would have likely encountered the same problem, Crittercism said. At the time, the most crash-prone release was Android 2.3.3, a version several steps back from the most recent.

Google did have an advantage for the apps themselves. The search firm doesn't actively screen many apps before they go into Android Market, letting developers quickly roll out bug fixes. Apple requires an approval process that typically takes one to two weeks and can get a disproportionate number of app crashes, even if the OS itself is more sound. [via Forbes]

By Electronista Staff

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iPod, iPhone, industry, Google, Android, mobile phones, Apple, iPad, Crittercism