Does iOS Crash More Than Android? A Data Dive

[Xilo]

My iPhone 3GS was crashing all the time. Hence why I switched to Android with the SGS2. Haven't had near as many problems.

[still1]

One good thing about Android is whenever an app crash you have an option to report it to the developer.

its send the details of the crash and the developer fix those issues.

I have seen many app which mention that in the change log.

[techbeck]

One good thing about Android is whenever an app crash you have an option to report it to the developer.

its send the details of the crash and the developer fix those issues.

I have seen many app which mention that in the change log.

Also, updates/fixes get approved and posted faster with android. Updates can take days or a week to get approved by Apple for iOS since it has to go through the approval process. With Android, and update/fix can be released within hours.

[Belazor]

Because I know what I'm talking about. I know what a crash is and how it manifests. A crash is not just "Oh crap. It's all gone wrong. Throw an error or reboot". IOS handles crashes a LOT better than android, and hides them from the user.

So you are saying that it's better to have the application you are using randomly vanish and the "desktop" appear than to see "This app may have frozen, wait or force close?" or "This app stopped working unexpectedly, force close"?

Maybe it's better for less computer literate people who think that is normal app behaviour, but I personally disagree that seeing no error message whatsoever is better than seeing an error message.

Please stop stating "iOS handles crashes a LOT better" as if it is a fact, when it is obviously personal preference. Thank you :)

[Denis W. Veteran]

What do you mean iOS crashes? Android doesn't "crash" either. It's always apps that crash.

The bottom line is that iOS is not "just working" while Android keeps crashing which is the BS mantra constantly being thrown out.

Besides the lack of a report dialog in iOS, wouldn't both OSes act the same way with regards to crashes?

In any case, anyone can deliberately do something silly like write data beyond the size of a list and trigger an app crash on an OS, and there are only a limited number of ways an OS can deal with that.

Quite petty to compare OSes based on "crashiness" if you ask me.

Because I know what I'm talking about. I know what a crash is and how it manifests. A crash is not just "Oh crap. It's all gone wrong. Throw an error or reboot". IOS handles crashes a LOT better than android, and hides them from the user.

The OS could be a bit more informative if an app repeatedly crashes a few times in a row. Regular users won't understand why, for instance, an app keeps returning to the home screen one second after starting it, and it doesn't help if they repeat launching the app over and over.

[Rory Costello]

I had an iPod touch.. I had to restore it so much it kept crashing.. In the end I scrapped it (hey it was only 2nd gen) and I got a Samsung galaxy ace, it works perfectly, it updates well, never had a problem

P.s the ipt probably due the the fact I was tinkering with the os but on the stock os, it crashed definitely more than once s month

[Growled Member]

My Android phone almost never crashes. I've had it almost a year now and I've had maybe two app crash the entire time.

[Boz]

As always.. we see proof that all that talk about how iOS is better is BS. Naturally these claims have always come from less than informed users and not backed up by facts.. as I have always said, from the very first iPhone until the last, iOS apps crashed more than Android ones.

One of the reasons is that developing apps for iOS/Obj-C forces you to keep track of your pointers and handle memory management and if a developer doesn't pay attention their app will eventually address a bad pointer or will try to garbage collect something that doesn't exist and the app will crash (though Apple uses their BS tactics by not showing any dialog boxes but simply kills the app when it crashes). Android apps on the other hand suffered from a different problem (Android handles garbage collection differently so this was not a huge issue), and this problem was the fact that some developers didn't use threads to offload main thread for UI and it caused apps to lock, showing the infamous (force close or wait dialog boxes). Since later versions of Android this practice has been addressed with many good things and Google introduced stuff like AsyncTask which allow you to easily run long-running processes on a separate thread while transfering results back to main UI thread with onPostExecute.

I'm glad someone came out and actually showed the numbers that destroy this Apple myth.

[StrikedOut]

You can't really blame any particular OS for crashing when 95% of the time, the crash is being caused by a poorly written app, not the OS itself. I doubt very much that many of these "measured" crashes were just OS based, for either brand.

This was my first thought. plus how many more can be put down to user 'error' and not the phone?

[neo1911]

99% of all those iOS crashes are caused by an app called Farmville.

For those with iPads and iPhones, just go to App store and download that app and run it.

I will change my name if you manage to run it even once at all. (v2.7 by the way.)

[shifts]

Crittercism, which is backed by Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, AngelPad, AOL Ventures, Opus Capital and Shasta Ventures, provides crash reporting to app developers

Google ventures, part of google i assume?

[MarkusDarkus]

Ha ha ha listen to you all. So your personal experiences are good enough to make an assumption on a whole market. Shut up. I have both, IOS crashes sometimes and Android crashes sometimes. It's just all down to luck and how good the programmer is with the particular app. I would say I've had a harder time with IOS but would never say that Android is better although Android does seem to cope better when I'm throwing a lot of complex things at it.

[Elliott]

One of the reasons is that developing apps for iOS/Obj-C forces you to keep track of your pointers and handle memory management and if a developer doesn't pay attention their app will eventually address a bad pointer or will try to garbage collect something that doesn't exist and the app will crash

And if your app is targeting iOS 4+, not using CoreFoundation, and is being compiled by the new LLVM compiler with Automatic Reference Counting enabled, this is (in most cases) a thing of the past.

[+Nik Louch Subscriber²]

When I say "iOS handles crashed better", what I mean is that it HIDES the fact that there is any kind of issue from the user. "Better" was a poor choice of word.

[FloatingFatMan]

When I say "iOS handles crashed better", what I mean is that it HIDES the fact that there is any kind of issue from the user. "Better" was a poor choice of word.

VERY poor. Just terminating the app without showing the user ANY kind of feedback as to why is the WORST imaginable way to handle an error!

[Elliott]

VERY poor. Just terminating the app without showing the user ANY kind of feedback as to why is the WORST imaginable way to handle an error!

There are certainly some ways Apple could make it more apparent that an app has crashed, but I find a "This app has crashed" or bug reporter modal dialog to be more annoying than just saying nothing. I'm usually aware that the app has crashed. A dialog just adds an extra step in between me and getting the app launched again.

[I am Reid]

hmm. Don't think I've experienced more than a couple crashes on my Desire HD but I thought iOS didn't crash at all for some reason.

are you being serious?? Why would ever think that, did you think iOS was immune to crashes or something?

[DeadEndAccount]

"Does iOS crash more than Android?" no, because the article is talking about app crashes NOT operating system crashes. How about READING the whole article before posting a misleading headline.

[Order_66]

I've had several iphones, ipads and ipods as well as several android phones and tablets, without a doubt android apps crash 100x more times for me than anything on ios, I just had an android app crash on me a few minutes ago on my galaxy S2 phone "GasBuddy" and last night the google play store crashed while I was browsing, facebook and ebay crash about every other day at least once, haven't had many crashes on ios, I think the cardshark app may have crashed once on my ipad.

[still1]

never had a single crash on my device after i moved to ICS for about 2 months now.

[MidnightDevil]

My HTC Desire only crashes when trying ultra alpha draft versions of ICS... lol .

[Boz]

are you being serious?? Why would ever think that, did you think iOS was immune to crashes or something?

No.. but that was the rhetoric of all Apple fanboys. iOS is infallible and perfection of the mobile OS and Android is a turd that crashes non-stop. Well now we see what's what.

[Shadrack]

I've had buggy iOS apps that crashed. But the OS always recovers gracefully on my phone.

I couldn't say if it is more or less than Android.

[Shadrack]

No.. but that was the rhetoric of all Apple fanboys. iOS is infallible and perfection of the mobile OS and Android is a turd that crashes non-stop. Well now we see what's what.

Rhetoric from a few iOS users and then wrapped in hyperbole and shot right back to ALL iOS users. Way to get back at em' bro! That will teach them.