Do iOS Apps Crash More Often Than Android Apps?

(10:45 am PDT, Feb 6th 2012)

Do iOS Apps Crash More Often Than Android Apps?
Crash analytics firm Crittercism released a new study this week, claiming that iOS applications crash more often than Android applications. After monitoring over 215 million apps across a wide range of different platforms, the report concluded that iOS 5.0.1 had the highest rate of application crashes. iOS in general also had more app crashes than its top competitor Android. These are interesting numbers that contradict the long held belief that iOS and the apps that run on it, are more stable than that of Android’s. So why such a large number of crashes on iOS?

One belief is that iOS has more apps than Android and therefore will have a greater number of app crashes. Another is that iOS 5.0.1 is still new and experiencing more issues than usual. No matter the reason, it’s safe to say that you’re always going to experience app crashes, regardless of the operating system you use. How often do you experience and application crash and what OS system are you using?

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Comment »

  • Anonymous

    Anecdotal evidence from my experience, I’ve definitely experienced more app crashes on 5.0.x than previous versions on my iPhone 4 and iPad 1st & 2nd generation.   Not just 3rd party apps, but Safari & App Store.  

  • Anonymous

    Take this with a grain of salt. First off, they only represent a very small sample. They said 215 million Apps, but it’s really 215 million App “launches”. That is, everytime you start an App and use it on your device, which for most people is many times per day. If you take the number of iOS and Android devcies there are, and the average number of times a person launches an App in a day, you come with a number easily 100 times their figure, which shows just how small their sample size is.

    Secondly, and most importantly, this is a debug tool used by App developers to spot crashes and send real-time data back. Of course, people having difficulty with their Apps are more likely to use such a tool, skewing the results.

    • Anonymous

      Yep and they are only from the select group of apps that use their error tracking service

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=595704908 Chan Kin Hou

    App crashes does not necessarily mean that the OS is bad. The apps in question could be bad too.

  • Anonymous

    It’s mostly because users have given up updating iOS for a long time and we’re using the outdated versions of the apps. There are apps as old as 2006 still on the market that need to be updated, yet the developers have quit publishing the latest version and moved on to a sequel, a based on version, or Android.

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001783517599 Gregory D Foster

      2006? I don’t think so, we didn’t even get the app store until 2008. 

      • Amr Khalifa

        Forget the App Store, the first iPhone came out in 2007!! :P

        • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001783517599 Gregory D Foster

          LOL! Precisely my friend. Precisely.

  • Anonymous

    I have experienced far more, probably 3 or 4 times as many, crashes on the Android devices I have owned versus the iOS devices I have owned. I don’t think I’ve ever had an app crash on my IPad 2. Not saying that is everyione’s experience, but this has been mine.

  • Anonymous

    yeah, loads of crashes on iOS

    as soon as it’s jailbreaked ;)

    my idevices are jbed, so i do have a comparison. but they only stay that way till apple get’s the hint and incorporates the missing features into the next build
    …
    ahh, cult of droidness!
    …
    FLAME ME :D

  • http://twitter.com/scottdot Scott Knauer

    Maybe they crash more on iOS only because Apple is actually selling apps in a thriving ecosystem. Meanwhile I know dozens of android users who only use stock apps.

  • Anonymous

    I have a few things about this. Crittercism is funded by Google Ventures, so how much can you believe their “study”. What were the controls used to measure the results? (EG: did they use stock phones, rooted phones, jailbroken phones) They tested iOS 5, we’re the apps they tested built or updated for iOS 5? Every app crash I have seen on an iPhone is primarily because the apps running were out of date and not updated by the user.

    Somehow this feels more like another Google propaganda event than a scientific study. I wouldn’t trust this as far as I could throw it. Good try Google, your FUD attempts are getting really pathetic.

  • Jon T

    Software crashes on my iPhone or iPad?!

    How about none?

    This ‘analysis’ has to be some kind of propaganda. It fails.

  • Anonymous

    Does this count jailbroken apps? If they did that would be stupid. And second about half the crashes are from IOS 5.0.1, come on its a new software with bugs.

  • http://twitter.com/nthnm Nathan Mitchell

    I get crashed immediately after major upgrades but after a few weeks, things are good and not a single app crashes until the next upgrade.

  • Robert Glover

    I had all kinds of app crashes on my Droid X.  Now on my iPhone 4S, it’s very rare that an app crashes.

  • Anonymous

    How is this even news? As the article states, the shear velocity of iOS apps to Android apps in terms of numbers throw off these findings but whats more, iOS 5.0.1 is just that, 5.0.1. Every new release of a platform is bound to have bugs especially with apps developed before 5.0.1 and updated to run correctly on the latest (major) release. Use numbers from before iOS 5.0 and I’m sure your findings will be completely different.

  • Jan Batora

    Really ?? this statistic is screwed on so many levels… only reason for the big 5.0.1 slice is that most ios devices now run on that version. that’s not a graph of app crashes by version, 5.0.1 being three times as big as some android version only means there are three times as many devices running 5.0.1, nothing else, this graph doesn’t say ANYTHING about reliability of ios or android.
    and if they say there were three times as many app launches on ios than android (so, 75%) and ios has nowhere near three quarters of that graph, it would only mean the frequency of crashes was higher on android
    people, learn some statistics, stop spreading this nonsense

    • Anonymous

       Please read what “normalized” means.

      Granted, I didn’t read the original article on how, exactly, this was done… but if it was done properly, then number of “app launches” and such would be accounted for. I’m not going to bother to dig into it to answer the question, because I know that my OGDroid doesn’t crash much at all, while my friend’s iOS devices do… and even they are impressed with how well my OGDroid works compared to their devices.

      I’m not saying Android is perfect either… I’m just saying that the stats show iOS is NOT… regardless of what you or other iDevice owners want to believe. I would estimate they are both comparably “bad” or “good”…

About the author

Vincent MessinaVincent Messina has been writing and evangelizing about Android for the past three years. When he's not playing the part of "Loki" to his 5 and 4-year-old, he can be found here, covering all things Android. He adamantly believes Android has the greatest community around and can be harassed at any of the following locations: Google+, Twitter.

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