Report: 46% of iOS apps crash more than 1% of the time

Nearly half, or 46 percent, of iOS apps have more than a 1 percent crash rate, according to mobile app performance firm Crittercism. The company's iOS State of Mobile Report was released just before Apple's launch of the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus and Apple Watch and was based on users of its platform who had optimized their apps for improved performance. 

  • T-Mobile US is the fastest iOS carrier while Sprint and US Cellular are the slowest (at 1.3x the speed of T-Mobile).
  • In the U.S., Virginia Beach has the fastest iOS and WiFi responsiveness while Cleveland has the slowest.
  • Raleigh has the fastest iOS carrier responsiveness while Kansas City has the slowest. 
  • France has the fastest WiFi responsiveness of all G20 countries while Japan has the fastest carrier responsiveness.
  • The most recent iOS versions (7 & 7.1) have a 2.1 percent crash rate.
  • Of all Apple mobile devices, iPhone 5s crashes least while the iPad Mini crashes the most.

The report says the iPhone 4s crashes the most among top iPhones. (Source: Crittercism)

"iOS apps depend on many services and service calls. A single app may make multiple services calls per end user interaction. Hence it is the aggregate latency and error rates across these service calls that determines the end user experience," the report said. "The two metrics to focus on are error rate and latency."

According to Crittercism, the Web's normal uptime is 99.9 percent and it says uptime for mobile should be under 1 percent. That makes sense, given how annoyed consumers get when their apps fail. The report suggests, however, that there's only so much developers can do about it. For example, Crittercism says the average iOS app relies on more than six different cloud computing services. This could include Facebook for logging in, Amazon Web Services for storage, and one of the many mobile analytics providers such as Flurry. If any of those go down, they may well bring the app's performance down with it. As Apple tries to build more functionality into iOS 8, offering some way to mitigate the risks with these sorts of dependencies may become its next killer feature. 

For more:
- download the full report here

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