Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Mobile
  3. News

‘It Just Works?’ Not quite: iPhones crash more than Android phones, study finds

Ed Oswald
By

iphones android crashes blancco study iphone transer comparison apple google smartphones nexus s5 s6 samsung htc
bloomua/123rf.com
One of Apple’s catchphrases for its devices in years past was “It just works.” That might not be as accurate anymore, according to a new study by Blancco Technology Group. In its latest quarterly “State of Mobile Device and Performance” report, the company claims crash reports have nearly doubled quarter over quarter, suggesting that Apple has its work cut out to improve its software.

Blancco says 58 percent of all Apple devices with its mobile diagnostic tools installed failed at some point during the quarter, compared to only 35 percent of all Android devices, up from just 25 percent last quarter. Sixty-five percent of the crashes on iPhones were due to apps, while Wi-Fi issues accounted for 11 percent of crashes. Headset or data connectivity issues crashed four percent of devices each.

Recommended Videos

What’s the cause of this dramatic increase in crashes on iOS devices? That’s difficult to ascertain, as Blancco provided little data on the phones in the test themselves. One possibility is a large number of iOS devices participating in the iOS 10 Public Beta were plagued by many of the issues that Blancco found as the most common early on, but have gotten dramatically better with successive releases.

Related

Among the biggest offenders when it came to apps that caused crashes on Apple devices were social media apps, including Snapchat (17 percent), Instagram (14 percent) and Facebook (9 percent). Android, on the other hand, seemed to have more problems with apps native to the OS itself, including Google Play Services (12 percent), Google Contacts Sync (5 percent) and the Address Book (5 percent).

As a whole, crashes on Android devices actually dropped 9 percent quarter-over-quarter, possibly indicating that Google itself might be starting to get a handle on the bugs that seem to plague some of its native apps. It did, however, have a greater rate of hardware-related issues, according to Blancco’s study.

In any case, third-party app stability seems to be much better overall on the Android platform, possibly due to the fact that Android places less restrictions on app developers in how they build their apps for the platform — and that shows in the fact that apps are at fault for crashes 50 percent less of the time than their iOS counterparts.

By device, the iPhone 6 and 6s were the most crash-prone on the iOS site, and Samsung devices fared the worst on the Android side. With Samsung, that might be more of a function of its massive market share. Other poor-performing devices were generally low-cost smartphone purveyors like Lenovo and LeTV. In other words, you get what you pay for.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Ed Oswald
Ed Oswald
Contributor
For fifteen years, Ed has written about the latest and greatest in gadgets and technology trends. At Digital Trends, he's…
Here’s how Apple could change your iPhone forever
An iPhone 15 Pro Max laying on its back, showing its home screen.

Over the past few months, Apple has released a steady stream of research papers detailing its work with generative AI. So far, Apple has been tight-lipped about what exactly is cooking in its research labs, while rumors circulate that Apple is in talks with Google to license its Gemini AI for iPhones.

But there have been a couple of teasers of what we can expect. In February, an Apple research paper detailed an open-source model called MLLM-Guided Image Editing (MGIE) that is capable of media editing using natural language instructions from users. Now, another research paper on Ferret UI has sent the AI community into a frenzy.

Read more
There’s a big problem with the iPhone’s Photos app
The Apple iPhone 15 Plus's gallery app.

While my primary device these days continues to be my iPhone 15 Pro, I’ve dabbled with plenty of Android phones since I’ve been here at Digital Trends. One of my favorite brands of phone has been the Google Pixel because of its strong suite of photo-editing tools and good camera hardware.

Google first added the Magic Eraser capability with the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, which is a tool I love using. Then, with the Pixel 8 series, Google added the Magic Editor, which uses generative AI to make edits that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. There are also tools like Photo Unblur, which is great for old photographs and enhancing images that were captured with low-quality sensors.

Read more
This new folding phone costs less than half the price of the iPhone 15 Pro Max
ZTE Flip 5G color options.

Earlier this year, ZTE offshoot Nubia showed off a foldable phone, and expectedly, the biggest draw was its supposedly attractive asking price. As U.S. shoppers waited for the phone to hit retail shelves, ZTE launched it in Japan as the Libero Flip. Thankfully, the wait is finally over on this side of the Atlantic, as well.

Nubia's website has recently listed the Nubia Flip 5G for pr-eorder on its website. The best part is the asking price, which is only $500 for the base variant with a respectable 8GB of RAM and 256GB of onboard storage. You can bump the RAM to 12GB and double the storage capacity for an additional $200.

Read more