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iPhones and iPads Fail More Often Than Android Smartphones (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The main question when picking a new phone is whether to choose an Android one or an iPhone. A new study coming from Blancco Technology Group sheds some light on which devices are the most reliable, based on reliability. The study entitled State of Mobile Device Performance and Health reveals the device failure rates by operating systems, manufacturers, models and regions, as well as the most common types of performance issues. The report reveals that in Q2 2016, iOS devices had a 58% failure rate, marking the first time that Apple's devices have a lower performance rate compared to Android. It seems that the iPhone 6 had the highest failure rate of 29%, followed by iPhone 6s and iPhone 6S Plus. Android smartphones had an overall failure rate of 35%, an improvement from 44% in Q1 2016. Samsung, Lenovo and LeTV were among the manufacturers with the weakest performance and higher failure rates. Samsung scored 26% in failure rate, while Motorola just 11%. The study also reveals that iOS devices fail more frequently in North America and Asia compared to Android. Specifically, the failure rate in North America is 59%, while in Asia 52%. The failures could be influenced by the fact that the quality of smartphones shipped around the world varies.
"Apple has wifi issues (I've encountered them too) - Android has toush screen issues, random reboots (random reboots?!?!) - therefore Android is better WTF?!" The article is stating that these problems occur more often on iOS vs Android, not that these problems occur on every phone. They are just listing the types of problems, not stating that one type of problem is better than another.
...which is no real surprise... Frankly none of us would even be responding if we thought the article, or /.'s posting of it, was any match to reality.
If you told me I had to read an entire random article off Softpedia's news page, I'd be disappointed and sad. But if I had to, there's at least 3 more interesting articles than this one (I just checked) right now. If you told me "it has to be one that will generate some cheap fanboy rage", I guess this one would be closer to the top and maybe I might check it out.
But once I did I'd see it was complete nonsense garbage and start shopping for a new one. It's unreadable - I have no idea what they're even claiming in half their sentences - but at very least it's clear their conclusion is way out of step with the data they're reasoning from.
I still read Slashdot out of some weird old habit, but the interesting finds are getting few and far between. It has become an anti-aggregator, finding the least interesting, poorest-written articles on sites that I wouldn't bother going to.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
I think what the poster was suggesting is that including 3rd party app crashes in this statistic in the same way as battery failure may be a bit misleading given the overall theme... For instance did they add weight to the fact that iOS has more apps for which to crash and that people use their iOS devices more than people use Android? This could be important so maybe a weighted per app MTBF would be a better approach. Or anything else as arbitrary as the original study. Now that I think about it, perhaps replacement should count as failure...
There are more Apps in Android's app store than in Apple's: 2.2M apps for Android, 2M apps for Apple.
http://www.statista.com/statis...
I couldn't find a source for "people use their iOS devices more than people use Android", can you cite that?
The conclusion I'm taking away from this is that the article (and perhaps study) are complete crap. The stats in the reporting fall apart at the slightest touch. For instance...
1) They're lumping everything from "the phone might've felt a little slow that one time" to "this phone literally summoned the Four Horsemen to usher in the end of the world" into a single "failure" bucket. No weighting, no granularity, and no consideration for the fact that we wouldn't even refer to most of those as "failures" or even the fault of the manufacturer.
2) Their math doesn't add up because they use the term "failure rate" to arbitrarily refer to multiple different concepts, most of which aren't even rates. The most obvious example comes from looking at the Android charts, in which they indicate that Android devices have an overall failure rate of 35%, with the worst manufacturer (Samsung) having a failure rate of 26%. But that makes no sense. If the worst manufacturer has a failure rate of 26%, then the highest the overall failure rate could possibly be (if that manufacturer sold 100% of devices) would be 26%. What they appear to be doing (but don't disclose) is using the term "failure rate" to refer to the share of failures that correspond to each manufacturer.
3) For similar reasons, you can't even compare their own numbers against each other. As the fine print in the image indicates, the "failure rate" for each model actually represents that model's share of the failures for their platform. Basically, there's a pie representing all iOS failures, and another representing all Android failures. The iPhone 6 gets 29% of the first pie, and the Le 1S gets 10% of the second pie, but who's to say which slice is actually bigger, since they never tell us how big each pie is? Plus, they cleverly hide the fact that the quantity of slices in each of those pies is likely orders of magnitude different by only telling us about the top 5 models from each.
This feels like a case of someone massaging the statistics until they get something that suits their need, given the odd bucketing and double-use of terminology. Blancco Technology Group, which authored the study, apparently counts at least one Android manufacturer on its list of clients, but given the way that manufacturer was unfavorably represented, I doubt that manufacturer is behind these trashy statistics. I don't know if Blancco is the one doing the massaging (since the report is behind a "give us your info and agree to receive our marketing" wall) or if it's Softpedia, but either way, there's no useful information in the article.
Were the stats flipped to favor the other side, I'd have the same critiques, since it's trash reporting either way, and Slashdot should be doing a better job of weeding articles that have no factual basis with which to prop up their clickbait headlines.
It's complete garbage from some kind of bullshit mobile marketing company: http://download.blancco.com/do...
Now I'm usually one to jump on bad stats given that I took a further degree in stats, but the first line of TFA answers your question:
"The study entitled State of Mobile Device Performance and Health focuses on the second quarter of 2016"
58% of all iOS devices sounds way too high for sure, until you recognise their broad definition of failure which can include failing to connect to WiFi, app crashes and so on.
So effectively the study is saying that in Q2 2016 58% of iOS devices suffered some sort of fault, but that fault might not actually be a big deal.
Beyond that I didn't read the report because I couldn't be bothered to sign up even with my junk details, so I can't really comment on how accurate their methodology might be, and hence how accurate their results might be, but if you're interested it's here:
http://info.blancco.com/state-...
I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that 58% of iOS devices suffered some kind of glitch in that period - all it would take is one buggy release of a popular app such as Facebook and the number is bound to shoot right up without it ever really being Apple's fault (beyond arguably not better vetting the quality of updates of apps perhaps).
When I Googled the report though, the first result was actually the 2016 Q1 report, where the results are the exact opposite:
http://www2.blancco.com/en/res...
I suspect therefore one of two things, either it is as I say and one broken major software release on a device or set of devices can greatly sway the stats in a quarter due to their broad definition of "fault" or they're just making these numbers up as a clickbait to try and get you to sign up to build up their userbase for monetisation purposes through ad revenue or similar.
I'm swaying towards the second, not that I'm a cynic or anything :)