If you maintain the ability to cast your mind as far back as earlier this week you may recall the furor over a couple of bugs in iOS 9.3. These bugs were quite annoying, but didn’t affect everybody and for most people the new iOS has been problem-free. All the same coverage of these flaws was…
“Blown out of proportion…”
At least according to fresh data from Apteligent (formerly known as Crittercism).
“OS 9.3 is Apple’s largest mid-cycle release in a long time,” the app analytics company explained, adding, “Despite this bug, iOS 9.3 stands as Apple’s most stable new release in years.”
Apteligent showed me data suggesting the average crash rate over the past eight days is 2.2 per cent for the new version of iOS, “by far the most stable iOS version,” they said.
Apteligent “For the sake of comparison, that’s better than any current Android release,” they said (italics mine). That even includes the most recent Android Marshmallow release, which has a crash rate of 2.6 percent – which makes the platform 20 percent more likely to crash than iOS.
Apteligent The rate at which apps crash on all Android versions continues to exceed that of the relatively crash-free iOS ecosystem. To befair it is relevant to note that the crash rate on both current mobile platforms seems fairly low, but the fragmented nature of one of them leaves customers far more prone to such annoyances.
Apteligent Fragments
There’s little future sign of any change in the way both markets develop. Apple’s iOS will continue to be more unified while Android will remain deeply fragmented.
Apteligent puts it like this when it: “Predicts iOS 9.3 will hit 50 per cent adoption by April 14th while Android updates continue to be stalled with Marshmallow at about 10 percent adoption.”
None of this is deal breaking, of course, but it does seem quite interesting to note how consistent the data appears to be across all geographies.
Apteligent Old versus new
It is also interesting that the two most widely used Android devices are both made by Samsung, one being 2013’s Galaxy S4 and the other 2014’s Galaxy S5. The S5 still has twice the usage share of the more recent S6 and the recently introduced S7 model isn’t even in the top ten.
Apteligent Apple’s more unified ecosystem sees the iPhone 6 variants occupying three out of the four top places, and with the new supercharged 4-inch iPhone SE set to hit the market this week, it seems likely remaining 4-inch iPhones will soon be updated to the more powerful edition. (Particularly across Apple’s critical developing markets).
This likely reflects Apple’s high brand loyalty and the nature of the more value conscious Android market, where some carriers offer older devices such as the Samsung Galaxy S5 at significant discounts, but there could be other ways of looking at this data, so I’ll let the graphs speak for themselves and invite your feedback in comments below.
Off the hook?
This doesn’t let Apple off the hook, of course – the problems users have encountered with iOS 9.3 have caused genuine frustration and the company certainly needs to repair the recently released Safari link bug ASAP. All the same, this new information suggests company executives can temper their frustration with knowledge that while problems do exist, for the most part the company remains on mission to deliver industry leading user experiences. Though the challenge seems to be that of getting that message through an increasingly critical media, beside vociferous competitors with seemingly unlimited marketing budgets.
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