A report from Blancco Technology Group found, among other trends, that Android devices tended to have a higher failure and issue rate than iOS devices through the first quarter of 2018. This doesn’t necessarily equate to devices becoming unusable, but also smaller issues like hardware errors with devices that caused defects in everyday use, software problems that led to consistent issues on devices, and of course, app compatibility and crashes, a big problem that Android has faced since day one with no end in sight. Combining all of these metrics, the report came to the conclusion that the overall failure rate for Android devices during this time was higher than that of iOS devices.
There are a few caveats for the demographic of this report; for starters, it does not cover the entire world. The report looks at North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. That said, this demographic sweep covers the vast majority of Android’s biggest markets, and findings point to Europe as hosting the most failing Android devices, with 37% of tested and surveyed devices and owners reporting some sort of problem. The worldwide average failure rate for Android devices was 18.9%, versus 15.2% for Apple iOS devices. As far as manufacturers, Samsung, Xiaomi and Motorola took the top three spots, though it should be noted that Samsung is the largest Android manufacturer in the world, so its popularity may partly explain the high failure rate, from a statistical standpoint. After all, more phones out there means more chances for devices to fail, and this metric is measured by the total percent of all surveyed failure-prone devices that come from a given manufacturer. Even so, Samsung’s 27.4% failure rate almost quadruples that of its nearest competitor in size, Huawei. Xiaomi and Motorola separate the two on the charts.
On the update front, it was found that roughly half of Android users surveyed were still using 2016’s Android update, version 7.0 Nougat, or one of its minor updates such as version 7.1.1. This disparity may be caused in part by older or weaker devices floating around that manufacturers simply don’t issue updates for. As for hardware repairs, it seems that repair centers that fix and refurbish devices seem to have problems with the camera, the earpiece speaker and the microphone.