Crittercism: Few apps can offer 99% uptime

Nearly half of all mobile apps can't reach the gold standard of 99 percent uptime, according to Crittercism. The company recently released its Mobile Experience Benchmark Report, which looked at a staggering 3 billion events a day over the course of one month. 

  • 42 percent of apps crash more than one percent of the time, and 32 percent have a crash rate of more than 2 percent. (In contrast, the norm for Web sites is under 1 percent, or 99 percent uptime, Crittercism says.) 
  • iOS 7.1 has the best crash rate of the Apple OSes at 1.6 percent, versus iOS 7 with a crash rate of 2.1 percent and iOS 6, which crashed 2.5 percent of the time. 
  • Gingerbread was the least stable flavor of Android, crashing at a rate of 1.7 percent vs. Kit Kat, Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean at 0.7 percent. 
  • Gaming apps have the highest crash rate at 2.5 percent. E-commerce has the lowest at 0.04 percent.


Research shows 47 percent of apps crash more than 1 percent of the time and 32 percent have a crash rate of over 2 percent. (Image Source: Crittercism)

"Improving mobile app performance is critical ... users will demand better performance for mobile apps," the report said. "As tablet adoption grows, expect developers to focus on optimizing performance for tablets, thereby bringing crash rates to be on par with smartphones."

Although this is obviously a pitch for Crittercism's application performance management (APM) products and services, it doesn't seem like the firm inflated the numbers. In fact, quite the contrary: The company said the 1 percent crash rate mentioned in the report was based on customers, whereas non-Crittercism users could have apps with crash rates in the 3 to 10 percent range.

APM tends to be more of a business play, but given what this report says about mobile gaming, developers may need to think not only about adopting but about what else they need to fine-tune their apps in order for them to have the kind of reliability that keeps users engaged. Nothing hurts your chances of monetization more than an app that crashes and leads a consumer to uninstall.

For more:
- download the report here

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