Which Crashes More? Apple Apps or Android Apps

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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A new study of smartphone apps between Android and Apple conducted over a two month period came up with some surprising results. Android apps crashed far less than Apple by a three to one ratio. If you are really into charts and graphs, you will be in heaven. :D

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.
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I dislike apple & I am still surprised by these results..
 
This is clearly wrong, the magic of apple would never allow an app to crash.
 
Not really surprising. My iOS apps crash all of the time.
 
I would rather have quality over quantity any day. Last I checked, WP7 market had over 70K apps? Sure Android and iOS have a lot more, but how many copy's of stupid sound boards do you need?
 
Blasphemy! How dare anyone say that anything of Apple be bad, or crash. If it has an Apple logo on it, it must have been divinely inspired to bless my life......pft...HA!
 
Doesn't it "just work...' on apple?

cant wait to hear the Apple loyalist excuses for this....
 
I've noticed my ipod crash a lot but didn't actually think it's significantly more than the Android. But then again ipod apps are simpler than the iphone apps.

One thing though is how the two handles instability of the app. When the ipod crashes, it just closes the app.. No notification and you can open the app right back up. Downplaying faults has always what apple has been good at.

On the Android, if the app crashes, you'll definitely know. And surprisingly, you'll often find that the app hasn't actually crashed. If the app was doing something very cpu intensive, like loading or processing a large file, you'll sometimes get an error message asking if you want to close it, even though you'll see the file had been successfully finished right under the error dialog. I just elect to wait and I'll be back on the app with the file finished.

Does the FC dialog count as a crash? Or do they only count it if you actually have to close it?
 
Sly said:
On the Android, if the app crashes, you'll definitely know. And surprisingly, you'll often find that the app hasn't actually crashed. If the app was doing something very cpu intensive, like loading or processing a large file, you'll sometimes get an error message asking if you want to close it, even though you'll see the file had been successfully finished right under the error dialog. I just elect to wait and I'll be back on the app with the file finished.
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If that happens, then the application is programmed incorrectly. You are not supposed to do long running tasks in main UI thread on Android. If you do, then the thing you described happens.
 
This is pretty embarrassing considering the almost unlimited nature of Android hardware configurations and software UI's....
 
This result smells fishy to me, considering the huge number of bandwidth-starved, crash-happy, all-debugs-enabled, never-finished Tegra 2 devices out there (cpufreq-dvfsd, we're looking at you). So much bad hardware has flooded the android market that it *should* be impossible for iOS apps to look worse.
 
As an Android owner, apps crashing is not something you find frequent, but still happens enough to piss me off. Everyone knows the "force close" thing.

I'd be surprised if Apple's is even worse.
 
I would really like to see how they collected this data and what they are counting as a crash. Something really smells fishy here.
 
If they build the smartphone applications like the shit on the desktop i'm surprised the crash figure is so low...
 
Not sure how that is possible i am an android fan and I am very shocked since IOS is pretty stable.
 
Even just Safari alone crashes on me multiple times daily on iOS. Most apps crash at some point.
 
BDS23 said:
My Nokia 3310 never crashes, never dies.
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And the Apple haters circle jerk continues!*

*I don't really care about iOS/Apple that much, I just hate anti-fanboys as much as fanboys! Everything should be taken with a grain of salt.
 
ARTICLE said:
In other words, the best apps in Android crashed about one third as many times as the best iOS apps, while the second best quartile Android apps crashed about half as much as comparable iOS apps, and in the quartile, the difference between the two operatings systems was even less.
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That little tid-bit made it even more interesting.
 
I am a little surprised by this to be honest and I am an android user. Now I work with iPhones and iPads all day so I do know just how frequently basically everything crashes on them and it is pretty damn often. However lower end android devices and unrooted/unmodded android devices in general pretty much suck dick for stability. I can't imagine that rooted/modded phones like mine are the standard. I of course run Cyanogen and I get an app crash at most once every few weeks, but I realize that is far from normal.
 
I've been using my iPhone since October and only had issue with one app not loading, USA Today.
I haven't had any apps crash or had the phone slow down.

I only have about 2 dozen apps so maybe I am lucky.
I just got an iPad 2 last night so we'll see how often apps crash on that.
 
PaperclipGod said:
I use an ipad a lot, and Safari crashes constantly. It's ridiculous.
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Truth. It seems to be really bad at managing memory, or something.

That said, there are a lot more iOS apps than Android ones, so the fact that there's a lot of crappy ones that crash doesn't otherwise surprise me.
 
I'm pretty shocked. I guess normal apps don't really crash, but I can make the web browser crash if I try to. Safari is shit, but it's less likely to crash because it doesn't deal with Flash and the sites it loads are simpler. I guess the Twitch.tv app crashes a bit, but still in my experience, iOS apps seem to crash less.
 
RazorWind said:
Truth. It seems to be really bad at managing memory, or something.

That said, there are a lot more iOS apps than Android ones, so the fact that there's a lot of crappy ones that crash doesn't otherwise surprise me.
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Number of apps doesn't actually reflect that. iOS or Android, you'll still be installing the same 20 basic apps on both. It's not how many apps are available, it's how many you are actually using. 20 calculator apps on the apple market, 5 on the android market, but you'll only be installing 1 from either.

In fact, if the number of apps is so large, then why would people intentionally be picking the unstable ones for their iOS out of such a huge library?
 
Surprised that Apple with all their "controlled monitored appstore" actually has more crashes than Android, which has an open app market.

I guess it's much easier to code a proper program when the source code is open source.

Personally, I have a Galaxy S2, never modded anything, in fact, never even hooked it up directly to a computer, and nothing has ever crashed.
 
I have a Moto Atrix 2 -- runs android 2.3.6 -- mostly stock but it is rooted, very stable, apps almost never crash. Even before I rooted it this was the case.
 
Android apps are programmed incorrectly when they show the ANR (Android Not Responding) message, this happens when the UI thread is tied up for more than 5 seconds by something that should not be running in a UI thread.

I have been guilty of app crashes, and most of the time it is from not following best practices.

My tablet crashes locks (I think it has some corrupt memory) up a whole lot, but then again it was one of the pre-release 10.1 GoogleIO tablets which I have not spent any time to update, so I could really care less. As far as my Vanilla Phones (Galaxy Nexus, Nexus One, G1), crashes (force close) were few and far between.

I actually like the fact that Android shows a message if there is a crash, it allows the user to report it, and add feedback on what they were doing.
 
PaperclipGod said:
I use an ipad a lot, and Safari crashes constantly. It's ridiculous.
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This.

To be honest, when my phone was still on Froyo, I could say app crashes were frequent. I could expect at least on a day. I don't know if coding has gotten better, Samsung has crap in Touchwiz that they fixed via firmware updates, or any other possible solution. It could even be that I am more selective with the apps I install. All I know is apps crashing on my phone is a rarity, even with me flashing ROMs that are rough around the edges.

Everytime I use my iPad, I can expect an app to crash. It was worse before I ran the iPad stock, but even now I have problems with random apps crashing. There just isn't enough RAM in the first gen iPad. I've restored my iPad a handful of times, and every time, the same issue occurs.
 
As an Android and Apple app developer, I would imagine a lot of it has to do with the actual APIs we have. Up until iOS 5 we had to do manual garbage collection, which not only doubled your code count, but it also left a lot of room for mistakes. I would imagine if you charted iOS 5 apps vs Android you find that the crash rate is about even. I recently rewrote an App that was originally create for iOS 3 and updated its codebase to 5. The end result was a greater than 50% reduction in code, which makes bug hunting and re-factoring a lot easier.
 
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