iOS apps crash three times as much as Android

Mobile app monitoring outfit Crittercism has compiled a large amount of data on application crashes which shows that iOS applications crash considerably more often than Android applications.

Apple’s iOS 5.01 alone accounted for 28.64 per cent of all application crashes across all iOS and Android mobile devices, as reported by Forbes in a ‘Data dive’ into the Crittercism results.

Even normalising for the number of reporting crashes, iOS crashed over three times more often with the ‘top quartile’ of iOS crashing 0.51% of the time, compared with 0.15% for Android.

It’s interesting that iOS apps should end up being more crash-prone than Android when considering that Android hardware and software versions are far more diverse than the relatively homogenous iOS devices. There’s also Apple’s curated ‘gatekeeper’ approach to approving every app that appears on the App Store.

One possible mitigating factor for Android is that developers can push crash-fixing updates virtually instantly compared to the often lengthy approval turnaround times for iOS developers.