Android 4.x is Twice as Stable as iOS 7.1 - Benchmark Report

Contrary to the notion that iOS is very stable while the messy Android crashes too often due to inherent bugs, a recent survey by Crittercism reveals a handful of completely surprising facts and findings.

According to the report, Crittercism monitored app usage of over a billion Android and iOS devices to conclude that the Android apps are twice as stable as its iOS counterparts, given the performance of latest versions on both platforms.

For the purpose of the study, Crittercism took into account complexity (hardware x OS version x carrier), app responsiveness, and app uptime. The report suggests that crash frequency for iOS 6 is 2.5%, while iOS 7 shows an improved 2.1% crash rate with iOS 7.1 being the most stable at 1.6%.

Despite the fact that Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) has been criticised for long due to inherent bugs and performance issues, the study says it is actually more stable than iOS with just a 1.7% crash rate. Furthermore, it is deduced that all versions higher than Android 4.0 had the least crash rate at 0.7%.

It clearly means that iOS 7.1 crashes two times more than any Android 4.x build.

In terms of devices, the Samsung Galaxy S4 is ascertained to be the most stable with just 0.9% crash rate, while the iPad 2 is the least stable at 2.6%. The iPhone 5 is found to be the most stable with a lower crash rate (1.7%) in comparison to iPhone 5s at 2%.

Among other key findings of the study, the response times for various apps have been calculated including the latency times and error rates for cloud services. For instance, Canada, Japan and US users enjoy the shortest latency times with Google Analytics having the lowest error rate at 0.1%.

On the apps front, YouTube and Twitter showed error rates of 1.2%, while Facebook is said to be more error-prone at 2.5%.

Consequently, in line with their error rates, the response times for these apps also jumps higher.

For instance, Twitter, Facebook and Flurry revealed the longest response times in the range of 574 to 750ms, while Google Analytics, Cloudfront and Admob had the shortest ranging from 237 to 389ms.

Gaming apps are said to be the least stable with the highest crash rate of 4.4%, while Ecommerce apps are more stable with the lowest crash rate of 0.4% as its cost of downtime is significant.

[Source: Crittercism via The Next Web]