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iOS Vs. Android: Which Has the Crashiest Apps?
First time accepted submitter creativeHavoc writes "Forbes author Tomio Geron takes a look at data accrued by mobile app monitoring startup Crittercism. After looking at normalized data of crashes over the various mobile operating system versions he compares crash rates of apps on the two platforms. He also breaks it down further to look how the top apps compare across the competing mobile operating systems. The results may not be what you expect."
iOS crashes more than Android (for those who don't feel like trawling through the (not brilliantly formatted) article.
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol
The $600 device's main purpose is NOT to make calls. It's an internet communications device that just happens to make phone calls. The people who insist that basic phones are just fine need to figure out this slight, but important, distinction. Buy an internet device if you want internet, but don't compare it to a phone.
Sorry, just not true. Before the iPhone, an unlocked Treo 650 cost about USD 650 (without contract). Some fashionable dumb or feature phones - like the Matrix Nokia chromed slider - retailed up to USD 1000 at the time - with contract and all.
In the short term, I'll probably opt for a BASIC voice-and-text flip-phone of some kind, because I can't afford (nor stomach!) spending $600 on a PHONE whose MAIN purpose is to MAKE CALLS when I can get a $70 model that will take care of that primary function just fine for now.
Its a common perspective, but first of all most people (at least in the US) buy their phone subsidized with a contract renewal, so the price for even a top-tier phone is $200-$300. Second, for me personally after using smartphones for a few years, I view it as the most significant personal (non-work) computing device I use daily. I definitely use it more than my home PC and tablet combined, and can therefore justify spending top dollar on a quality "phone". I won't make assumptions about you, but I know many people who found, when they get a smartphone, that its main purpose is NOT to make calls.
You have nobody to thank for this but a: the carriers and b: apple.
It is they, who in collusion, raised the price of buying a phone to astronomical levels. Remember when the highest price for an unlocked phone was usually $200? What phone broke that trend? Iphone.
Well, either that, or you didn't notice expensive phones before the iPhone, since unlocked Treos were $600 in 2006. But sure, you dislike Apple so it's probably Apple's fault.
I was bored this morning, so for those interested, since the article makes it hard to extract this information:
All iOS versions total 84.36% of crashes; all Android versions total 15.49% of crashes. The worst offenders for iOS are version 5.0.1 at 28.64% and 4.2.10 at 12.64% (with seven other version listed at above 1% of crashes). The worst offenders for Android are versions 2.3.3 at 3.86% and 2.3.4 at 3.65%, with 4 other versions listed at above 1%.
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
In the role of User, I don't give a flying fuck why Windows crashes more than Linux. All I know is that it does.
A User? A User! Hey guys, we got a User here! Which one of you let him in?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I dunno how iOS works, but on the Android platform the user has to clear RAM manually.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that you probably don't know how Android works either.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
but the most popular phone leading up to iphone was the RAZR (2004). initial price in the states was $600 bucks.
http://gizmodo.com/270353/the-razr-taught-us-that-the-iphone-is-priced-juuust-right
It was 2004 when the RAZR launched in the US as a high-end design clamshell. It was $600, with a $100 dollar rebate from Cingular. yes, soon after launch the price dropped precipitously much like smart phones now. today you can get an android or ios phone (NEW) for just about every price point from free to 800 bucks.
oh, and don't forget the venerable StarTAC. 1996 - ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_StarTAC).. a primary selling point of which was support for OMG.. wait for it.. SMS. ...a free iphone 3GS is as capable as a laptop of the StarTAC era. Apple didn't set the bar, Motorola did - TWICE. Together the StarTAC and RAZR sold over 100M units.
so poett, you either forgot or are too young to have ever known ;)
Android has a nasty habit of letting apps hold their state in RAM so they start up quicker next time.
1) It's not "nasty".
2) It's not "so they start up quicker", it's so they don't need to start again in the first place.
3) The system will automatically kill background apps in this state if there's not enough memory to go round.
Bad apps crash -- sure. But *worse* apps may appear to keep working while storing up later trouble for the user.
Whenever I see a list of software fault types with "crash bug" at the apex, I cringe. When I led a software team, I had to de-program developers who were trained that crashing is the worst possible thing an app can do. It isn't. There are many worse ones, such as leading a user to trust false data, exposing sensitive information, and losing or corrupting a user's work. The worse thing about a crash in the absence of data loss or long recovery time is that it undermines user confidence. It's often possible for a well-architected app to crash (due to programming faults of course) with no serious implications for the user.
Crashing per se isn't a problem. It's a *symptom*. This is important! I've caught developers "fixing crash bugs" without addressing the real problems: failure to program defensively around unexpected conditions like bad input or inability to secure resources like memory or file references. I've seen super-general exception handlers buried way down on the stack which catch every possible exception and quietly attempt to restore the semblance of operation, even though they can't possibly know whether the application is in a consistent state, or whether it is holding orphaned resources. Programmers do this because they've been inculcated with the false notion that crashes per se are terrible things. This leads to hiding the symptoms errors rather than fixing the errors themselves. Hiding the cause of a crash increases the probability of faulty information, loss of data, and shipping a release with serious defects.
So don't treat crashing as a problem, but as an alert signal. A crash in itself is benign, an honest recognition of failure if you will.
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