Android is the most stable mobile OS, says new report

By David Nield March 30, 2014

android stable mobile os says new report kitkat — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Android has been declared as the most stable mobile operating system in a new report from Crittercism, a company specialising in app analysis and management. The firm looked at statistics generated by more than a billion iOS and Android applications, finding that Android KitKat’s 0.7 percent crash rate was some way below the 1.6 percent crash rate detected on iOS 7.1.

The good news for Apple is that the bugs are slowly being squashed — iOS 6 had a crash rate of 2.5 percent while iOS 7.0 registered a rate of 2.1 percent. KitKat was the best performer for Android along with Jelly Bean and Ice Cream Sandwich, while the buggiest version was Gingerbread (1.7 percent).

“There are a 100 million factors that affect the performance of a mobile app,” Crittercism CTO Rob Kwok explained to TechCrunch. “As new mobile platforms such as wearables grow in adoption, the challenge to provide a consistent, high-quality experience to users will be even more difficult and mobile teams need purpose-built solutions to manage overall app performance.”

There are plenty of other interesting bits of information in the report: Tablet apps crash more often than smartphone ones, for example, while games are the worst offenders with a crash rate of 4.4 percent. Due to network stability and other factors, patterns vary based on geographical region — apps run from Canada were found to crash least often.

Crittercism found that the average app now relies on six different cloud services (for facilities such as remote storage, third-party logins and analytics). Overall, nearly half of all apps crash more than 1 percent of the time, while almost a third half a crash rate above 2 percent.

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Dave is a freelance journalist from Manchester in the north-west of England. He's been writing about technology since the…

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