Well this is a shocker. According to research done by Crittercism, applications on iOS crash significantly more than on Android. This just proves how much perception matters, and Google isn’t helping itself here. Many people right now believe that it’s actually Android that crashes more often. One reason is because Android actually shows you when an application crashes with a frustrating force close report.
The first time I saw that myself, it made me frown on the OS itself, because it’s a pretty scary/negative message. On the other hand, iOS doesn’t do this, and it just exits the application and returns you home. If Android were to do this, too, I believe the perception that Android is buggy would die down quite a bit.
What’s surprising about it all is that even though Android has to work on hundreds of devices, and iOS only on a few, iOS is still the one to have applications crash more often on it. One explanation for this also comes from the fact that iOS apps get updated very slowly, so if they do have bugs in them, then the people using them are going to experience that bug for quite a long time before the fix appears. But on Android, the developer can start working on the fix as soon as someone reports it, and then send his update as the fix is ready, which could even be hours. This leads to a lot more stable applications on Android in general.
As Eric Schmidt said last year, this might finally be the year of Android, when developers start making applications first for it, because it’s a lot easier to experiment, deploy and maintain your app, and you don’t risk your app being rejected by Apple.
[Source: Forbes]