iPhones and iPads Fail More Often Than Android Smartphones (softpedia.com) 176
An anonymous reader writes: The main question when picking a new phone is whether to choose an Android one or an iPhone. A new study coming from Blancco Technology Group sheds some light on which devices are the most reliable, based on reliability. The study entitled State of Mobile Device Performance and Health reveals the device failure rates by operating systems, manufacturers, models and regions, as well as the most common types of performance issues. The report reveals that in Q2 2016, iOS devices had a 58% failure rate, marking the first time that Apple's devices have a lower performance rate compared to Android. It seems that the iPhone 6 had the highest failure rate of 29%, followed by iPhone 6s and iPhone 6S Plus. Android smartphones had an overall failure rate of 35%, an improvement from 44% in Q1 2016. Samsung, Lenovo and LeTV were among the manufacturers with the weakest performance and higher failure rates. Samsung scored 26% in failure rate, while Motorola just 11%. The study also reveals that iOS devices fail more frequently in North America and Asia compared to Android. Specifically, the failure rate in North America is 59%, while in Asia 52%. The failures could be influenced by the fact that the quality of smartphones shipped around the world varies.
Good lord.... (Score:5, Funny)
I shudder to think how they would otherwise determine which devices are the most reliable.
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Returns while the device is under warranty?
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Based on how much advertising they purchased?
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By hacking into manufacturer data? Because I doubt any of them would willingly give that data out.
Re:Good lord.... (Score:5, Funny)
I think reliability is a reliable index for reliably verifying the reliability of reliable devices. I rely on such reliable sources.
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I don't think that word means what you think it means...
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> I don't think that word means what you think it means...
No, "reliable" means "consistently good in quality or performance; able to be trusted" not "what you think it means...".
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That would be absolutely, totally, and in all other ways inconceivable!
I just had to add this (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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That depends on what the precise definition of "is" is.
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Bubba will understand.
Re: Good lord.... (Score:2)
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A Reliably Redundant Post!
Re:Good lord.... (Score:5, Insightful)
They have some weird math going on though. iOS devices have a 58% failure rate, and of those iOS devices the iPhone 6 has the highest rate with 29%.
So the weighted average between 29% and a bunch of lower percentages is 58%?
Re:Good lord.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The stats are dopey. 58% fail rate in what period of time? Did 58% fail in Q2 or whatever? Do 58% fail in the first two years? I can't make any sense of these stats and TFA is no help. What am I missing here?
Re:Good lord.... (Score:4, Informative)
Now I'm usually one to jump on bad stats given that I took a further degree in stats, but the first line of TFA answers your question:
"The study entitled State of Mobile Device Performance and Health focuses on the second quarter of 2016"
58% of all iOS devices sounds way too high for sure, until you recognise their broad definition of failure which can include failing to connect to WiFi, app crashes and so on.
So effectively the study is saying that in Q2 2016 58% of iOS devices suffered some sort of fault, but that fault might not actually be a big deal.
Beyond that I didn't read the report because I couldn't be bothered to sign up even with my junk details, so I can't really comment on how accurate their methodology might be, and hence how accurate their results might be, but if you're interested it's here:
http://info.blancco.com/state-... [blancco.com]
I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that 58% of iOS devices suffered some kind of glitch in that period - all it would take is one buggy release of a popular app such as Facebook and the number is bound to shoot right up without it ever really being Apple's fault (beyond arguably not better vetting the quality of updates of apps perhaps).
When I Googled the report though, the first result was actually the 2016 Q1 report, where the results are the exact opposite:
http://www2.blancco.com/en/res... [blancco.com]
I suspect therefore one of two things, either it is as I say and one broken major software release on a device or set of devices can greatly sway the stats in a quarter due to their broad definition of "fault" or they're just making these numbers up as a clickbait to try and get you to sign up to build up their userbase for monetisation purposes through ad revenue or similar.
I'm swaying towards the second, not that I'm a cynic or anything :)
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I suspect therefore one of two things, either it is as I say and one broken major software release on a device or set of devices can greatly sway the stats in a quarter due to their broad definition of "fault" or they're just making these numbers up as a clickbait to try and get you to sign up to build up their userbase for monetisation purposes through ad revenue or similar.
I'm swaying towards the second, not that I'm a cynic or anything :)
I've got to second your cynicism. The stats are worthless for just about any practical use.
Re: Good lord.... (Score:2)
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Perhaps the answer to this conundrum will be found to lie with the source of the funding for the study. The study certainly seems to be measuring things strangely. I don't see any other way to judge the portion of the report you found fault with as anything but "math challenged" - "Out of the 58 percent of iOS devices that failed, iPhone 6 had the highest failure rate (29 percent), followed by iPhone 6S (23 percent) and iPhone 6S Plus (14 percent)."
"Failure" must be being measured as the discovery of a f
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For every 100 i devices, 58 of them fail
Let's take a look at what those numbers actually mean.
How much you want to bet that those "crashing apps" are older apps that the user hasn't updated while they did upda
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Indeed. The key question with % is always "of what?". It seems that all percentages are relative to total iOS sales, which is not intuitive, but it does make some sense. Therefore, 58% can be divided into smaller percentages based on individal models.
58% of all iOS devices failed
29% of all iOS devices were failed iPhone 6
Maybe 60% of all iPhone 6 failed (but that number is not given, it depends on the market share of the iPhone 6)
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The slides that accompany TFA indicate that the percentages for individual devices are what fraction of the total failures for that OS came from that device. So if 0.58 x # of failing iOS devices = N, then N x 0.29 = # of failing iPhone 6. The summary simply removes the information content for the device-level numbers.
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And apparently in the nomenclature of this study, a shitty app crashing constitutes a "failing device".
Personally, I find that to be a problem with the app, not the fucking device. Especially when some of the apps named get updated on a weekly basis with the total comments about the updates being "bug fixes".
Re: Good lord.... (Score:2)
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Yeah, because I'm sure that's what was happening - the Facebook app was taking a shit and bringing the whole OS session down with it.
Nope, not even once. Because protected memory is still a thing, and has been on every OS worth talking about in the last 16 years.
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When I worked for AT&T Wireless (Pre-cingular), the least reliable devices were always the cheapest devices (Which were always flip-phones, and nearly universally LG phones, though Samsung was #2 in the failure rate, however nothing failed more than the Motorola V60 series)
So reliability tends to downtick every time a new device is released. It's a question of how long that downtick is. Like you can pretty much frame all Android devices as unreliable if you use a 3 year window, due to failed firmware up
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I shudder to think how they would otherwise determine which devices are the most reliable.
The device that finishes recursion first?
So my iPhone 5 SE is ok then? (Score:1)
Apparently they only sell it in Asia, so that means it has a 52 percent fail rate, right?
What kind of stupid ass reporting is this?! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not an "apple boi" by any stretch of the imagination but c'mon -
"The main issues that owners of iOS smartphones face is not being able to connect to a WiFi network, dropped connections, slow speeds and incorrect password prompts. Android smartphone users struggled with camera issues, battery charging, touch screen issues, app crashes, syncing problems and random reboots."
Apple has wifi issues (I've encountered them too) - Android has toush screen issues, random reboots (random reboots?!?!) - therefore Android is better WTF?!
"The study also revealed that 50% of iOS applications crashes in Q2, compared to 23% of Android apps."
ok but that's not necessarily and iOS problem per se - (I don't blame Microsoft for Adobe's lousy QA or, heh, iTunes crashes...) So what's the details here...
"Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat were among the top apps to crash on iOS, while Google Play Services, Google Contacts Sync and Address Book crashed the most on Android."
Facebook crashes on iOS but Address Book crashes on Android - ergo Android is better?! Again... WTF!?
Re:What kind of stupid ass reporting is this?! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What kind of stupid ass reporting is this?! (Score:5, Insightful)
"The article is stating that these problems occur more often on iOS vs Android, not that these problems occur on every phone"
The title of the article is:
"iPhones and iPads Fail More Often Than Android Smartphones – Study"
This means the authors of the article want you to think that Androids are better than iPhones.
Yet a Wifi connectivity issue is given the same weight as a touch screen failure or a random reboot because those problems only affect 1/3 of Android phones whereas 2/3 of iphone users have wifi connectivity problems.
What's the point of an Apples (heh) to oranges comparison other than the click-baity title then?
There's no real information here. Just massaged statistics for an ad hit. It's worthless for a comparison and, worse, the raw data doesn't make any sense in the article either so it's doubly worthless.
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The whole idea of comparing "Androids" to "iPhones" is idiotic anyway.
There are thousands of Android devices running many variations of the OS on hardware costing from tens to thousands of dollars, with 2.5cm to 150cm+ screens. The iPhone 4 had a defective antenna design, leading to a 100% failure rate without the rubber, and has by far the worst failure mode in that Apple Maps is so bad it can actually kill you. [bgr.com]
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Actually, no. It was a stupid antenna design, and a legitimate problem, but it wasn't nearly that bad. It varied by individual phone (I could manage to get a one-brick/dot degradation by licking my finger and putting it hard on the sensitive spot on mine), and even the first report I saw was a result of testing three phones and finding one with a problem. Then I saw a lot of media making it sound a lot worse t
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Apple has wifi issues (I've encountered them too) - Android has toush screen issues, random reboots (random reboots?!?!) - therefore Android is better WTF?!
The WTF here is your suggestion that your personal experience and what you've personally read in forums trumps an actual study on the topic.
Facebook crashes on iOS but Address Book crashes on Android - ergo Android is better?! Again... WTF!?
That's not what they are saying. They are just making a statement about the apps that crash the most on each platform. The quotes stats are based on overall crashes across all apps.
Re: What kind of stupid ass reporting is this?! (Score:3)
I think what the poster was suggesting is that including 3rd party app crashes in this statistic in the same way as battery failure may be a bit misleading given the overall theme... For instance did they add weight to the fact that iOS has more apps for which to crash and that people use their iOS devices more than people use Android? This could be important so maybe a weighted per app MTBF would be a better approach. Or anything else as arbitrary as the original study. Now that I think about it, perhaps r
Re: What kind of stupid ass reporting is this?! (Score:4, Informative)
I think what the poster was suggesting is that including 3rd party app crashes in this statistic in the same way as battery failure may be a bit misleading given the overall theme... For instance did they add weight to the fact that iOS has more apps for which to crash and that people use their iOS devices more than people use Android? This could be important so maybe a weighted per app MTBF would be a better approach. Or anything else as arbitrary as the original study. Now that I think about it, perhaps replacement should count as failure...
There are more Apps in Android's app store than in Apple's: 2.2M apps for Android, 2M apps for Apple.
http://www.statista.com/statis... [statista.com]
I couldn't find a source for "people use their iOS devices more than people use Android", can you cite that?
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I'm sure it's true if you count all Android phones, since some of those are $20 phones purchased to sit in a drawer for occasional use, and many of them don't come with a data plan so can't be used away from wifi.
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Who the cares if there's 2M vs 2.2M? The vast majority of people use the same apps: Facebook, Twitter, a few store apps, the popular game(s) du jour (Candy Crush, Pokemon, etc) The remaining tend to be hidden-browser style apps for stores.
Literally 95% of those apps could disappear and nobody would give two shits.
I mean, if you really want to get technical, generally speaking, only one app (on idevices) can crash at any given time. On Android, there can be a lot more running tasks for customizations and system changes. Logically speaking, Android SHOULD be the one that crashes more since there's a lot more interactions going on.
Apparently the the parent poster does since he said that the availability of more apps on the iPhone contributes to more crashes.
Sounds like weak logic, but that assumption is not even true.
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Nothing you say matters unless they treated the two platforms differently when it came to gathering their "failure" rate. Both platforms are pretty much interchangeable across their user base so it's as close to an apples to apples are you are going to get.
I think what the poster was suggesting is that including 3rd party app crashes in this statistic
It's a user satisfaction survey, not a rating of the stability of the underlying OS. I don't think users care why their apps are crashing only that they are.
For instance did they add weight to the fact that iOS has more apps for which to crash and that people use their iOS devices more than people use Android?
I have no idea what that means. iOS devices have more apps installed? There are more iOS apps over
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Why are they calling an app crash a 'device failure' on either platform, unless the app is distributed with the device?
Why is Apple responsible for shitty code written by a 3rd party, which may or may not be a proper version of the app for the installed OS? Why is Google?
Should we start blaming Intel when Adobe applications inevitably crash now, or should we continue to blame Adobe for not caring enough to actually QA?
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Why are they calling an app crash a 'device failure' on either platform, unless the app is distributed with the device?
Perhaps because when it comes to user perception it is a device failure. I don't think the average use cares why things don't work.
Why is Apple responsible for shitty code written by a 3rd party
That's not the point. The article is just reporting stats regarding user experience. You are imagining finger pointing at Apple. It's not. It's finger pointing at the experience of using the device.
But anyway, sometimes app stability has to do w/ the stability of the platform + services it offers. It's not always app coding errors that result in crashes. It also has to do w/ the
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Apple has wifi issues (I've encountered them too) - Android has toush screen issues, random reboots (random reboots?!?!) - therefore Android is better WTF?!
Device workey, vs device no workey. That's all. It doesn't matter if the phone can't connect to my wifi network, or bursts into flames and sets my dog on fire. Either way it's being sent back for replacement.
Re:What kind of stupid ass reporting is this?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What kind of stupid ass reporting is this?! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm glad you posted this, because the fact that facebook sucks at supporting ios is not Apple's bad. It's also not relevant to those of us that either don't use facebook, or don't use their mobile app. Why use facebook as a metric, and not, say, some arbitrary other third party app? Statistics are lies because statisticians are liars!
iPhones and iPads Fail More Often Than Android? (Score:2)
It seems that the iPhone 6 had the highest failure rate of 29%, followed by iPhone 6s and iPhone 6S Plus. Android smartphones had an overall failure rate of 35%
So is /. bad at basic comprehension or basic arithmetic?
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That statement seems to imply that 29% of all iPhone 6 phones failed, and somewhat lower % of 6s and 6s+ failed. If one averages that, it will be a number less than 29%. Toss in 5 and 4, and that failure rate would decrease. In the meantime, 35% of all Android smartphones failed. How on earth would iOS devices fail more than Android?
Note that I'm talking about this study, not about any real data. My only phone that once failed on my was my Lumia Ikon - the battery stopped charging
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It doesn't imply that, it directly states it. It states that the iPhone 6 failure rate is 29%, which is the highest failure rate (among what set of things is unknown).
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Re:iPhones and iPads Fail More Often Than Android? (Score:5, Insightful)
So is /. bad at basic comprehension or basic arithmetic?
No, the math failure was the fault of the linked article's author, Alexandra Vaidos.
Not to mention that calculating a metric based on applications not always launching and referring to that as the phone's "failure rate" is rather ludicrous. Plus if iPhone or Android apps were truly that unreliable, nobody would be using them - the numbers are simply unbelievable.
But, in the end, a bunch of us clicked on the story link... so Ms. Vaidos accomplished her goal.
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But some /. editor read that, copied that, possibly discussed that, and hit the publish button without thinking: how can the worst failure rate be lower than the average failure rate?
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The worst iPhone has a failure rate of 29%, but the average iPhone is twice as bad at 58%. Don't ask...
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The loaner phones (Score:5, Funny)
The main question when picking a new phone is whether to choose an Android one or an iPhone.
Somewhere a group of Windows phones are sitting on bar stools, all on their 10th shot, wondering... "Where did I go wrong?"
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Rest in palms...
Very small, poorly written article (Score:2)
Numbers not adding up... (Score:3)
A 58% failure rate? In one quarter...that's three months? Or is it that the article is as of Q2 2016...in which case I'd want to know the overall period covered, and the definition of "failure." If it's a 3-year period and replacing the phone with an upgrade is classifying it as having "failed," then I could see how this rate would be possible...but out of purely anecdotal insight from the fact that nearly everyone I know (and everyone I work with) has an iPhone, I don't see how this can be right.
But what's REALLY odd is that 58% is an average of the various IOS devices, right? So how is it possible for the overall rate to be 58% if the device with the highest rate of failure only had a rate of 29%? How do you average 29 with any combination of lower numbers to get 58?
Straight from the website from which you can download the actual report (linked in the TFA):
Out of the 58 percent of iOS devices that failed, iPhone 6 had the highest failure rate (29 percent), followed by iPhone 6S (23 percent) and iPhone 6S Plus (14 percent).
When I try to solve for 58% using those numbers, Excel just gives me the Skeptical African Kid Meme. [memegenerator.net]
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A 58% failure rate?
I think it's how they are defining "failure". My guess is that it's if a user experienced a problem of any sort, that's a failure.
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Mu iPhone hasn't been rebooted since the release of 9.3.3. I'm getting ready to install 9.3.5, so I guess there is another reboot.
I've owned every iPhone since the 3G and I've never had to reboot on a regular basis.
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So let me see if I understand this epic math fail correctly. Given n devices, there were k devices that were brought in for repair. Of those k devices, 58% were iOS devices, an
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No, that's what failure rate is supposed to mean. However, what the numbers actually said are:
These two statements cannot both be true simultaneously by any proper definition of "failure rate". The iPhone 6 is a subset of all iOS devices. The claim is made that its failure rate was 29%. For the failure rate of all iOS dev
Clickbait (duh) (Score:4, Informative)
Fire manishs (Score:3)
None of this shit makes any sense!
The main question when picking a new phone is whether to choose an Android one or an iPhone.
I'd wager most people are already tied to an ecosystem. For iOS people it's a question of "When's the new one coming out?" or "Do I want the big one or the small one?". For Android people it's "Do I pick some random cheap one or just buy the Samsung Galaxy again?".
A new study coming from Blancco Technology Group sheds some light on which devices are the most reliable, based on reliability.
Odd, I usually base reliability reports on mouth feel and buoyancy.
The study entitled State of Mobile Device Performance and Health reveals the device failure rates by operating systems, manufacturers, models and regions, as well as the most common types of performance issues.
That would be neat info to have.
The report reveals that in Q2 2016, iOS devices had a 58% failure rate, marking the first time that Apple's devices have a lower performance rate compared to Android.
I wonder how they define "failure rate", maybe I'll read TFA to find out. Wait, "lower performance rate"? WTF is that? Do you mean "higher failure rate". I wonder if this is the fault of the dumbass submitter, TFA, or the actual report. And "first time"? Odd, I've never heard of a prior time that "Blancco Technology Group" released such report. Maybe they're an up-and-comer I should start paying attention to.
It seems that the iPhone 6 had the highest failure rate of 29%, followed by iPhone 6s and iPhone 6S Plus.
Wait, if the highest failure rate is 29%, how do we end up with a 58% failure rate for iOS devices? What subset or subcategory does "iPhone 6" fall under? What "iOS devices" are excluded from that category? Clearly, some significant iOS devices with high failure rates (58% or higher) had to be excluded from the subset/subcategory that gave us the "highest failure rate" of 29%.
Android smartphones had an overall failure rate of 35%, an improvement from 44% in Q1 2016.
So 29% is higher than 35% now? WTF is going on?
Samsung, Lenovo and LeTV were among the manufacturers with the weakest performance and higher failure rates. Samsung scored 26% in failure rate, while Motorola just 11%.
Didn't we just establish an overall failure rate of 35% for Android? Clearly some manufacturer is hitting higher than that, and it's not Samsung. Why would you call out Samsung and not the worst offender?
The study also reveals that iOS devices fail more frequently in North America and Asia compared to Android.
Well, we established that overall, with the "iOS devices had a 58% failure rate" bit at the top and the comments about how Android's failure rate is lower, depending on what contradictory numbers we're looking at.
Specifically, the failure rate in North America is 59%, while in Asia 52%. The failures could be influenced by the fact that the quality of smartphones shipped around the world varies.
Yes, the fact that quality varies in different regions could be due to the fact that the quality of phones varies across different regions! Unless they're suggesting that "quality" and "failure rates" are not directly comparable for the purposes of this study. The only way that could be true is if they didn't control for cause of failure, so "quality" here could mean something along the lines of "survives an American sitting on it" versus "survives an Asian sitting on it".
Define "fail" (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it anywhere explained what exactly "fail" means? Apparently more than an outright "phone bricked", it also includes software issues of all kinds, including Facebook crashing. There are so many problems with including such numbers that an entire meta study is necessary to normalize the resulting numbers into something comparable, which this article doesn't even begin to do.
Unless and until the exact criteria are published, this is worthless horseshit.
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Unless and until the exact criteria are published, this is worthless horseshit.
Horseshit isn't worthless. [ebay.co.uk]
Re: Define "fail" (Score:2)
Good horseshit isn't. This stuff here thoughâ¦
How are these articles picked? (Score:5, Informative)
If you told me I had to read an entire random article off Softpedia's news page, I'd be disappointed and sad. But if I had to, there's at least 3 more interesting articles than this one (I just checked) right now. If you told me "it has to be one that will generate some cheap fanboy rage", I guess this one would be closer to the top and maybe I might check it out.
But once I did I'd see it was complete nonsense garbage and start shopping for a new one. It's unreadable - I have no idea what they're even claiming in half their sentences - but at very least it's clear their conclusion is way out of step with the data they're reasoning from.
I still read Slashdot out of some weird old habit, but the interesting finds are getting few and far between. It has become an anti-aggregator, finding the least interesting, poorest-written articles on sites that I wouldn't bother going to.
More reliable, not less (Score:3)
One vector of "unreliability" the article talked about was iPhones "failing to connect to WiFi".
Let's just put aside the problem with equating network reliability with hardware reliability... there's a big difference in HOW both devices connect to WiFi, by design.
Apple in the last year or so changed iOS so that it will prefer to stay on a cell connection if it seems like the WiFi is going to be flaky or unreliable.
So the "WiFi failing to connect" is a result of the software making the network connection (you know, the whole reason why you are trying to connect to the WiFi in the first place?) MORE reliable for the user, not less... we all know by now sometimes the cell network is vastly better than a sketchy WiFi node.
I have just been lucky (Score:2)
That's honestly pretty surprising. (Score:2)
What is surprising is that 'Android devices' as a whole would perform so well. It is the
Anecdotal by I agree (Score:2)
what is an "incorrect password prompt"? (Score:2)
And who measures it?
Does this mean I just forgot my password?
PROTEST (Score:2)
Here is the actual report (Score:4, Informative)
The main question (Score:2)
The main question when picking a new phone is whether to choose an Android one or an iPhone.
Not really. Based purely on market share, the main question is whether to get a Samsung or not.
Use what works for you (Score:2)
If true at all, this is the user type and casing. (Score:2)
The results of this may be true, but if so, the results are quite sure to be solely based on average type of user and perhaps casing material.
Also iPhones are more likely to be used by people who couldn't be bothered to make a big decision out of their smartphone purchase, they just get what everybody else has and what they constantly hear about in the news and leave it at that. Hence many iPhones in the hands of people who aren't really thinking twice or being aware of the basics of treating hardware in a
Reliability of software, not hardware (Score:2)
This report is very strange and so is the Slashdot summary. This is not a comparison of hardware platforms, i.e. wether Apple or Samsung phones actually experience some form of hardware failure more often. Instead the report focuses on software issues, like application crashes, which form the bulk of "failures". Also reported are difficulties in accessing Wifi or poor sound quality using Bluetooth.
Their use of statistics is also questionable. Their graphics are misleading.
Take this report with a grain of sa
Yeah but (Score:2)
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That is a very cool opinion from an AC. My opinion is much different.
Just the other day, I needed to read an RFID tag for an iPhone user, because my Android has that feature and iPhone will NEVER have that feature.
So, IMHO iPhones suck because even though they can, they don't. Walled Gardens and all that.
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Just the other day, an iPhone user was praising SIRI and how great it was, and tried to search to see what area codes are used in San Bernadino. SIRI responded with some nonsense about not wanting to do that right now or something. I asked Google the exact same question, and got the correct answer "Okay GOogle, what are the area codes for ________"
You should try it.
Every time I use an iDevice, I have found it is just "less" than my experience on Android. Mind you, I'm not full Apple everything (AppleTV, App
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Single Data points are all I have to reference. And data connectivity wasn't an issue, as we have enterprise class WiFi in the building and the AP was just 20 ft away.
When Google Now (OK Google) can't connect, it doesn't say anythng cute, it says something useful (Unable to connect or whatever)
Its just that everytime I've seen Siri actually used by iPhone people, it is less than what I get with Android and Google Now. The exceptions are the "cute" answers that Siri sometimes gives when it can't actually ans
Android is starting. Optimizing App 15 of 480. (Score:4, Funny)
Sorry, I can't reply to your comment, my Android is still booting...
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Re:BS (Score:5, Informative)
The conclusion I'm taking away from this is that the article (and perhaps study) are complete crap. The stats in the reporting fall apart at the slightest touch. For instance...
1) They're lumping everything from "the phone might've felt a little slow that one time" to "this phone literally summoned the Four Horsemen to usher in the end of the world" into a single "failure" bucket. No weighting, no granularity, and no consideration for the fact that we wouldn't even refer to most of those as "failures" or even the fault of the manufacturer.
2) Their math doesn't add up because they use the term "failure rate" to arbitrarily refer to multiple different concepts, most of which aren't even rates. The most obvious example comes from looking at the Android charts [softpedia-static.com], in which they indicate that Android devices have an overall failure rate of 35%, with the worst manufacturer (Samsung) having a failure rate of 26%. But that makes no sense. If the worst manufacturer has a failure rate of 26%, then the highest the overall failure rate could possibly be (if that manufacturer sold 100% of devices) would be 26%. What they appear to be doing (but don't disclose) is using the term "failure rate" to refer to the share of failures that correspond to each manufacturer.
3) For similar reasons, you can't even compare their own numbers against each other. As the fine print in the image indicates, the "failure rate" for each model actually represents that model's share of the failures for their platform. Basically, there's a pie representing all iOS failures, and another representing all Android failures. The iPhone 6 gets 29% of the first pie, and the Le 1S gets 10% of the second pie, but who's to say which slice is actually bigger, since they never tell us how big each pie is? Plus, they cleverly hide the fact that the quantity of slices in each of those pies is likely orders of magnitude different by only telling us about the top 5 models from each.
This feels like a case of someone massaging the statistics until they get something that suits their need, given the odd bucketing and double-use of terminology. Blancco Technology Group, which authored the study, apparently counts at least one Android manufacturer on its list of clients, but given the way that manufacturer was unfavorably represented, I doubt that manufacturer is behind these trashy statistics. I don't know if Blancco is the one doing the massaging (since the report is behind a "give us your info and agree to receive our marketing" wall) or if it's Softpedia, but either way, there's no useful information in the article.
Were the stats flipped to favor the other side, I'd have the same critiques, since it's trash reporting either way, and Slashdot should be doing a better job of weeding articles that have no factual basis with which to prop up their clickbait headlines.
Re:BS (Score:4, Insightful)
Mod this up.
By the apparent criteria of this "study", all devices fail 100% of the time because, at some point, one of its many capabilities will fail to work when someone tries to use it.
Re: BS (Score:4, Funny)
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Not that I think Apple is the end all be all either. But for personal use I use an iPhone because it does seem snappier; I want a pho
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My THL6C cost GBP36 (less than $50) and has dual sims, latest Android (MegaPlotz or whatever its called, as of July) great reception, clear voice, exchangeable battery, SD card, etc. Camera is a bit naff. Does the job though. My family bought 6 of these, and 5 are still working. The other was lost in the airport, and may be still working I don't know.
One of us owns an Apple of some sort. It is still working on the rare occasions when the battery is not flat.
Reliable r
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I give it a 2/10. Your propaganda really needs to have some plausibility.
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One part of your experience that rings false to me is the level of support required for Windows machines vs Macs. My experience is narrower than yours, because I'm a programmer not an IT support guy, but I do get used as an IT support guy by friends and family because, you know, I "do computers". With that caveat, my experience is that the single biggest thing I can do to reduce my support burden is to get them to trade in their Windows laptop for something else. The very best alternative is a Chromebook, t
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Because pressing the wrong buttons makes screens crack, batteries explode, device just turn off, touchscreens to wear (sometimes to the point of vertical / horizontal lines on the screen), etc. etc. etc.? Yeah, okay.
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We use iPad Minis in school. Hundreds of them.
There's an app that views my home CCTV camera on iPad. I install it, purely to make the iPad "do something" during the course of the day. The others allocated to the IT department are in cupboards and drawers, uncharged and unused.
So I put my camera up on my iPad and use it as remote CCTV for my house while I'm at work.
Every 8 hours or so, it crashes the iPad back to black screen, Apple logo, progress bar, back into lock-screen.
Sure, it's a misbehaving app.
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