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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.
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!?
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?"
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.
So is /. bad at basic comprehension or basic arithmetic?
No, the math failure was the fault of the linked article's author, Alexandra Vaidos.
Not to mention that calculating a metric based on applications not always launching and referring to that as the phone's "failure rate" is rather ludicrous. Plus if iPhone or Android apps were truly that unreliable, nobody would be using them - the numbers are simply unbelievable.
But, in the end, a bunch of us clicked on the story link... so Ms. Vaidos accomplished her goal.
#DeleteChrome
...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.
That statement seems to imply that 29% of all iPhone 6 phones failed, and somewhat lower % of 6s and 6s+ failed. If one averages that, it will be a number less than 29%. Toss in 5 and 4, and that failure rate would decrease. In the meantime, 35% of all Android smartphones failed. How on earth would iOS devices fail more than Android?
Note that I'm talking about this study, not about any real data. My only phone that once failed on my was my Lumia Ikon - the battery stopped charging
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".
The worst iPhone has a failure rate of 29%, but the average iPhone is twice as bad at 58%. Don't ask...
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...
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...
No, it states that all Androids have a 35% failure rate. If any of them are 35% failure rate. Which is still higher than the iPhone 6 number of 29%
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.