Apple's mobile devices, which accounted for more than 70 percent of the company's 2015 revenue, has consistently stayed on top of other brands in terms of reliability. This is supported by a collection of well-documented annual studies in which Apple consistently held on to the top spot in the reliability metric — until now, that is.
A recent study by the Blancco Technology Group titled "State of Mobile Device Performance and Health" for Q2 2016 reveals that iOS devices are almost twice as likely to fail when compared with competing brands that run on Android.
iOS devices charted a 58 percent failure rate, which more than doubles the 25 percent they had for Q1 2016. Android devices, on the other hand, managed 35 percent, which is an improvement from its 44 percent back in the first quarter of the current year.
"Plagued by crashing apps, Wi-Fi connectivity and other performance issues, the iOS failure rate more than doubled to 58 percent quarter-over-quarter," says Blancco after noting that iOS lost the smartphone performance battle to Android.
As the figure shows, 29 percent of the iOS failure rate is from the iPhone 6. This is followed by the iPhone 6s at 23 percent, iPhone 6s Plus at 14 percent, iPhone 6 Plus at 13 percent and the iPhone 5s at 8 percent. Blancco explains that a possible culprit for the iPhone 6's current performance could be some of Apple's recent software updates, namely iOS 9.3.1 and iOS 9.3.2, which were released in April and May, respectively.
"Following both software updates, many iPhone and iPad users began to see major problems on their devices," Blancco comments.
Android device failure rate statistics show that Samsung is responsible for 26 percent of it while both Lenovo and LeTV individually accounted for 17 percent. Motorola and Asus trailed at 11 and 7 percent, respectively. Blancco, however, noted that having Samsung atop the list is not a surprise given that it is responsible for 37 percent of smartphone sales during the three-month period ending in May 2016. Xiaomi, which accounted for 11 percent of all mobile device failures in Q1, got out of the top five.
Blancco's charts [downloaded PDF, via Dropbox] also reveal that LeTV's Le1S has the highest failure rate among Android smartphone models at 10 percent. Next to it is another LeTV model, the Le 1S Eco, at 7 percent. Lenovo's Vibe K5 Plus, Vibe P1m and Vibe K3 Note trailed the LeTV models at 6 percent, 4 percent and 4 percent, respectively.
The performance issues on Android devices mostly stem from the camera and battery charging, which were both charted at 10 percent. Touch, speaker and microphone issues are also in the top five issues detected on Android devices. As for performance issues on iOS, the Wi-Fi, headset, mobile data and receiver are some of the more prominent culprits. However, all four combined would still be dwarfed by the crashing apps, which accounts for 65 percent of the performance issues.
According to Blancco, its data shows that 50 percent of iOS apps and 23 percent of Android apps crashed during the second quarter of 2016. Social media apps Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger and Google, respectively, make up the top five applications (for Q2) that frequently crash on iOS.
