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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.
I shudder to think how they would otherwise determine which devices are the most reliable.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Apparently they only sell it in Asia, so that means it has a 52 percent fail rate, right?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'm not an "apple boi" by any stretch of the imagination but c'mon -
"The main issues that owners of iOS smartphones face is not being able to connect to a WiFi network, dropped connections, slow speeds and incorrect password prompts. Android smartphone users struggled with camera issues, battery charging, touch screen issues, app crashes, syncing problems and random reboots."
Apple has wifi issues (I've encountered them too) - Android has toush screen issues, random reboots (random reboots?!?!) - therefore Android is better WTF?!
"The study also revealed that 50% of iOS applications crashes in Q2, compared to 23% of Android apps."
ok but that's not necessarily and iOS problem per se - (I don't blame Microsoft for Adobe's lousy QA or, heh, iTunes crashes...) So what's the details here...
"Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat were among the top apps to crash on iOS, while Google Play Services, Google Contacts Sync and Address Book crashed the most on Android."
Facebook crashes on iOS but Address Book crashes on Android - ergo Android is better?! Again... WTF!?
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%
So is /. bad at basic comprehension or basic arithmetic?
The main question when picking a new phone is whether to choose an Android one or an iPhone.
Somewhere a group of Windows phones are sitting on bar stools, all on their 10th shot, wondering... "Where did I go wrong?"
That article is so small, it is hard to even argue about what is says. Not enough information to even properly understand what it is trying to present.
A 58% failure rate? In one quarter...that's three months? Or is it that the article is as of Q2 2016...in which case I'd want to know the overall period covered, and the definition of "failure." If it's a 3-year period and replacing the phone with an upgrade is classifying it as having "failed," then I could see how this rate would be possible...but out of purely anecdotal insight from the fact that nearly everyone I know (and everyone I work with) has an iPhone, I don't see how this can be right.
But what's REALLY odd is that 58% is an average of the various IOS devices, right? So how is it possible for the overall rate to be 58% if the device with the highest rate of failure only had a rate of 29%? How do you average 29 with any combination of lower numbers to get 58?
Straight from the website from which you can download the actual report (linked in the TFA):
Out of the 58 percent of iOS devices that failed, iPhone 6 had the highest failure rate (29 percent), followed by iPhone 6S (23 percent) and iPhone 6S Plus (14 percent).
When I try to solve for 58% using those numbers, Excel just gives me the Skeptical African Kid Meme.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
...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.
None of this shit makes any sense!
The main question when picking a new phone is whether to choose an Android one or an iPhone.
I'd wager most people are already tied to an ecosystem. For iOS people it's a question of "When's the new one coming out?" or "Do I want the big one or the small one?". For Android people it's "Do I pick some random cheap one or just buy the Samsung Galaxy again?".
A new study coming from Blancco Technology Group sheds some light on which devices are the most reliable, based on reliability.
Odd, I usually base reliability reports on mouth feel and buoyancy.
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.
That would be neat info to have.
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.
I wonder how they define "failure rate", maybe I'll read TFA to find out. Wait, "lower performance rate"? WTF is that? Do you mean "higher failure rate". I wonder if this is the fault of the dumbass submitter, TFA, or the actual report. And "first time"? Odd, I've never heard of a prior time that "Blancco Technology Group" released such report. Maybe they're an up-and-comer I should start paying attention to.
It seems that the iPhone 6 had the highest failure rate of 29%, followed by iPhone 6s and iPhone 6S Plus.
Wait, if the highest failure rate is 29%, how do we end up with a 58% failure rate for iOS devices? What subset or subcategory does "iPhone 6" fall under? What "iOS devices" are excluded from that category? Clearly, some significant iOS devices with high failure rates (58% or higher) had to be excluded from the subset/subcategory that gave us the "highest failure rate" of 29%.
Android smartphones had an overall failure rate of 35%, an improvement from 44% in Q1 2016.
So 29% is higher than 35% now? WTF is going on?
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%.
Didn't we just establish an overall failure rate of 35% for Android? Clearly some manufacturer is hitting higher than that, and it's not Samsung. Why would you call out Samsung and not the worst offender?
The study also reveals that iOS devices fail more frequently in North America and Asia compared to Android.
Well, we established that overall, with the "iOS devices had a 58% failure rate" bit at the top and the comments about how Android's failure rate is lower, depending on what contradictory numbers we're looking at.
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.
Yes, the fact that quality varies in different regions could be due to the fact that the quality of phones varies across different regions! Unless they're suggesting that "quality" and "failure rates" are not directly comparable for the purposes of this study. The only way that could be true is if they didn't control for cause of failure, so "quality" here could mean something along the lines of "survives an American sitting on it" versus "survives an Asian sitting on it".
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Is it anywhere explained what exactly "fail" means? Apparently more than an outright "phone bricked", it also includes software issues of all kinds, including Facebook crashing. There are so many problems with including such numbers that an entire meta study is necessary to normalize the resulting numbers into something comparable, which this article doesn't even begin to do.
Unless and until the exact criteria are published, this is worthless horseshit.
Bitten Apples are still better than dirty Windows...
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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...
One vector of "unreliability" the article talked about was iPhones "failing to connect to WiFi".
Let's just put aside the problem with equating network reliability with hardware reliability... there's a big difference in HOW both devices connect to WiFi, by design.
Apple in the last year or so changed iOS so that it will prefer to stay on a cell connection if it seems like the WiFi is going to be flaky or unreliable.
So the "WiFi failing to connect" is a result of the software making the network connection (you know, the whole reason why you are trying to connect to the WiFi in the first place?) MORE reliable for the user, not less... we all know by now sometimes the cell network is vastly better than a sketchy WiFi node.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Only issue I've really faced is a battery that expanded, and the local non-Apple shop that specializes in Apple products replaced it really cheaply. No other issues that I can think of since I got my first one five and a half years ago. I'm even running their Beta iOS 10 and it runs amazingly well.
I try my best not to bias my opinion against Apple - mainly because I'm forced to work with them - but I have to say this just confirms my own numbers.
I work in schools so I deal with all kinds of devices from servers and PCs down to smartwatches and phones. As "IT" I also get lots of people use me as their personal technical support (my employer doesn't mind, and even encourages it as a value-add for other staff, so long as it doesn't interfere with real work).
Pretty much across the board, people with iPads, iPhones and Macs experience many more failures per device than the rest. I don't even SEE Android users after setting up the email on their phones (something we have to do for them, by policy, so we know they aren't just buying new phones and setting them up themselves). iPhone people also seem to break their screens SO OFTEN that it's just laughable.
I have precisely one dead Samsung tablet "on the pile", and no end of iPods, iPads, iPhones and other gadgets.
The Mac Minis, especially those sold as "servers"? Laughable.
The Mac desktops? Laughable.
And then when you do this not just on a "per-device" basis, but on "per-value" basis, it gets even sillier as you can buy 2-3 or more of the competition for the price of one Apple. You don't get any more work done for that price either, and certainly don't get less failures.
A member of staff brought in some things from clearing out their mother's house after she died. One was a BBC Micro, complete and working. We snapped that up. Then they said "Oh, and I have a Mac at home that just stopped working, it's only a year or two old, I suppose you want that?"
She was quite surprised by our answer. Needless to say, we spent the afternoon with "BOOP-BEEP" startup sounds as we played about with the BBC, but nobody wanted the Mac. Nobody even asked the spec. Literally nobody in the IT office cared about it.
But I have no doubt she ran out and just bought another Mac. Like the person who had a MacBook Pro that nearly exploded because the battery bulged like fuck in it and we refused to touch it and told them to get it off-site (we're a school, so there are kids and I do NOT want some personal device brought on site, exploding, and hurting someone - I am NOT going to do the paperwork and deal with the stupendous health-and-safety aftermath of something like that) and dispose of it elsewhere as soon as they could.
I'm forced to support Apple, against my wishes, and I try really hard to spin positives from what they offer. But I literally can't find enough to justify. It's basically popular "because it's popular", like designer trainers or something. In terms of actual figures on almost any aspect, Apple devices are atrocious.
It's not a huge surprise that the reliability of Apple widgets isn't appreciably better than high end Android gizmos; Apple is hardly the only company in the world that knows how to shove a bunch of solid state hardware into a tight space; and to the degree they are atypically skilled at it they usually end up focusing on extra skinniness and similar aesthetic considerations that don't necessarily enhance reliability.
What is surprising is that 'Android devices' as a whole would perform so well. It is the blessing, and the curse, of Android that pretty much anyone can slap it into almost anything; and vendors take full advantage of that. I would have expected the floods of dire crap to drag down the average reliability rating considerably.
I have a cheap LG that I drop periodically. Works as poorly as the day it was new (it's a $100 Android from 2014 so what can I say?). Replaced my kid's iPhone three times as it just kept getting slower and slower. Cores burning out maybe?
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I've been through an iPhone 3, 4S, and now a 5S (now several years old) and have not had a problem with any of them other than my dropping them causing display cracks. I try to keep my battery at near the (ideal) ~40% charge level never letting it get below 20% or charging above 80% and batt life is still near new levels.
I can count on one hand the number of crashes I experienced, however, I am apparently not the typical user as I don't install a zillion apps for everything (no facebook, bank, games or other crappy apps - the stock apps have been stable).
I chose the iPhone 5S because I like the chunkier, meatier form factor and the 6s seemed so thin I am afraid I'd break it in half if I sat on it in a back pocket. I believe the thinness of the 6 is what causes alot of trouble due to the entire frame flexing.
"The report reveals that in Q2 2016, iOS devices had a 58% failure rate... It seems that the iPhone 6 had the highest failure rate of 29%..."
If the highest failure rate of any model was 29%, how does the overall product line have an average failure rate of 58%?
And who measures it?
Does this mean I just forgot my password?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
That is a very cool opinion from an AC. My opinion is much different.
Just the other day, I needed to read an RFID tag for an iPhone user, because my Android has that feature and iPhone will NEVER have that feature.
So, IMHO iPhones suck because even though they can, they don't. Walled Gardens and all that.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Just the other day, an iPhone user was praising SIRI and how great it was, and tried to search to see what area codes are used in San Bernadino. SIRI responded with some nonsense about not wanting to do that right now or something. I asked Google the exact same question, and got the correct answer "Okay GOogle, what are the area codes for ________"
You should try it.
Every time I use an iDevice, I have found it is just "less" than my experience on Android. Mind you, I'm not full Apple everything (AppleTV, Apple Computer, Apple whatever). I expect if you go "all Apple, all the time", it just works ... sort of. But in my world, where I can mix n match and get the same (often better) results, I'll stick with Android.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I am totally against determining the most reliable phone in terms of reliability.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
My THL6C cost GBP36 (less than $50) and has dual sims, latest Android (MegaPlotz or whatever its called, as of July) great reception, clear voice, exchangeable battery, SD card, etc. Camera is a bit naff. Does the job though. My family bought 6 of these, and 5 are still working. The other was lost in the airport, and may be still working I don't know.
One of us owns an Apple of some sort. It is still working on the rare occasions when the battery is not flat.
Reliable reliability data is hard to come by, and this ain't it!
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I'm actually wondering if maybe people tend to just toss their Android devices, but if you have spent $500+ on a device you damn well want to fix it. Personally, my Samsung S3 is just on the way out right now though but I did need to replace the battery once.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Mod this up.
By the apparent criteria of this "study", all devices fail 100% of the time because, at some point, one of its many capabilities will fail to work when someone tries to use it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It's complete garbage from some kind of bullshit mobile marketing company: http://download.blancco.com/do...
Sorry, I can't reply to your comment, my Android is still booting...
The main question when picking a new phone is whether to choose an Android one or an iPhone.
Not really. Based purely on market share, the main question is whether to get a Samsung or not.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
For me arguing about IOS and Android, Linux and Windows for me is a bit like some mechanics arguing about who has the best spanner. Who cares, just use the tools that work for you and move on I say.
eh, winning is losing 1/4 your market share in 10 years, someone needs a lesson in marketing.
I'm done with Slashdot. I miss the days of curated, relevant, SANE content.
The results of this may be true, but if so, the results are quite sure to be solely based on average type of user and perhaps casing material.
Also iPhones are more likely to be used by people who couldn't be bothered to make a big decision out of their smartphone purchase, they just get what everybody else has and what they constantly hear about in the news and leave it at that. Hence many iPhones in the hands of people who aren't really thinking twice or being aware of the basics of treating hardware in a way that is less risky for it to break.
That many Androids have plastic as an enclosure helps mitigate the effects of a lot of drops, due to the flexibility. That alone could account for the difference, as all iPhones are built out of aluminum.
Points in case: ... But, as you may guess, I'm a computer expert to the utmost extent. Hence I use a neat Moto G2 that costs about a fifth the price of an iPhone, yet I can do way more with it than some regular person with his iPhone. And also it will last longer, as I am aware how to treat hardware, from back in the day when hardware like this was expensive and a device such as todays smartphones would've been handled and treated like the holy grail.
I've moved to Android with my last Smartphone and have the habit of getting my protection case and my protective glass *before* I purchase a new model.
In fact, the availability of a good/usable protective case and proctective glass is one of the criteria for me choosing a phone, a criteria and a purchasing order I recommend to anybody who asks me for advice when getting a new smartphone.
My girlfriend had a little red symbian Nokia touchscreen smartphone that looked like it had been run over by a tank. Twice. Cracked screen, parts of it not reacting, needing to remove sim and reboot at times - the works. I bought her a cheap current-day android 5 smartphone - red casing, ... important detail(!) :-) - and got protective casings and protective glass, SD card and stuff and gave it to her as a present all in a bundle. She would've never purchased her phone that way.
Her demografic for large parts is an intersection with todays classic iPhone user - not really interested in the details.
I'm sure this plays into the breakage quota aswell. You can say what you want about Apple, but saying that they build bad hardware is just being silly.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
There's also this:
http://www.appleworld.today/blog/2016/8/25/blanca-technology-group-claims-iphones-are-plagued-by-crashing-apps-wi-fi-connectivity-and-performance-issues
"Finally, a published study from Blancco itself in February, 85% of all mobile device failures during the fourth quarter of 2015 came from Android handsets compared to just 15% of issues which originated on iOS. It’s hard to believe that things have changed so dramatically in six months."
This report is very strange and so is the Slashdot summary. This is not a comparison of hardware platforms, i.e. wether Apple or Samsung phones actually experience some form of hardware failure more often. Instead the report focuses on software issues, like application crashes, which form the bulk of "failures". Also reported are difficulties in accessing Wifi or poor sound quality using Bluetooth.
Their use of statistics is also questionable. Their graphics are misleading.
Take this report with a grain of salt.
Android and iOS have very different philosophies. Android devices aim to be general-purpose computer, iOS devices aim to be extensions to a general-purpose computer. I have an Android tablet and an iPad, and I find I get a lot more use from the iPad because it doesn't try to replace my computer. There's a bunch of stuff that I can do on the Android tablet that I can't do on the iPad, but all of it is stuff that I'd be better off doing on my laptop anyway (with the one exception of an IRC client that doesn't disconnect when I switch to a different window). I still use Android for my phone, because OSMAnd~ (offline maps, offline routing, open source, and good map data) is the killer app for a smartphone for me and the iOS port is far less good.
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You should try it.
I did. And your single data point is easily countered by my single data point where I asked that question and instantly got the answer. You don't suppose that maybe there was a service disruption for the device in question that caused Siri to not be able to perform the search do you? I'll bet those same connectivity problems ABSOLUTELY NEVER happen to Google even with the same points of failure (the telco) riding between...
Single Data points are all I have to reference. And data connectivity wasn't an issue, as we have enterprise class WiFi in the building and the AP was just 20 ft away.
When Google Now (OK Google) can't connect, it doesn't say anythng cute, it says something useful (Unable to connect or whatever)
Its just that everytime I've seen Siri actually used by iPhone people, it is less than what I get with Android and Google Now. The exceptions are the "cute" answers that Siri sometimes gives when it can't actually answer the question. Which is exactly what I saw this time, and gave an example.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Unless a platform is absolutely trouble free, quality of service is equally important.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
I recently purchased anot expensive phone from a well known brand, and after less than a day it stopped. I was told the "battery" was dead and it needed "recharging". This is unacceptable!
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Not entirely fair to compare to modern day devices, but I had a lot of those same issues with a Galaxy S1, which was utterly horrible, and my 2012 Nexus 7 became more and more bogged down over each upgrade. With Jellybean, it's about useless, forget having more than one app open at a time. (though since putting Cyanogen mod on it, it's much more like it's original self).
Not that I think Apple is the end all be all either. But for personal use I use an iPhone because it does seem snappier; I want a phone above all else, the smart features are great but if lags or reboots while trying to place a call while I'm stranded in my car somewhere, it's not worth it. I don't really want a portable computer more than I want a solid phone. That also being said, I have an S4 now for a work phone, and though it has minor quirkiness here and there, it's miles and miles better than that old S1 I had, and seems pretty reliable.
Really, as someone who grew up in the late 60s and early 70s, all these gadgets are kind of amazing to see realized. They're like one of the few future predictions that really came true.
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