According to research carried out by mobile app monitoring company Crittercism, iOS apps crash on a more frequent basis than those of its Google-created Android counterpart.

Having conducted the study during the course of the first two weeks of December, the results also highlights iOS 5.0.1 – Apple’s most recent iteration – as the most culpable, with 28.46% of all crashes attributable to that specific firmware version. In its defense though, it’s a relatively new revision, having only been released in November to fix an array of issues prevalent in the first end-user release.

The newness of 5.0.1 could also mean that a month later – when the research was gathered – many app devs hadn’t gotten around to properly updating apps for seamless compatibility with the updated iOS release.

The test was pretty thorough, with 23 different versions of iOS and 33 different Android versions covered in total. The emerging pattern seems to show that iOS 5 aside, older versions of the fruit company’s closed-source mobile software account for a huge chunk of the app-crashing total. iOS 4.2.1 was accountable for just over 12% of crashes, iOS 4.3.3 was responsible for 10.66% and iOS 4.1 had 8.24%.

The data, which tracked the use of over 214 million apps between November and December 2011, pitches iOS apps as at higher risk of crashing across all quartiles:

This second chart illustrates the percentage of app crashes across all Android and iOS versions covered in the research:

The results, whilst maybe surprising to some, once again raise the debate of Apple’s often slow response to iOS flaws. Although the app developers themselves may share some of the collective blame, the Cupertino-based company has yet to fix the battery issues plaguing many iPhone 4S users – all of whom would have paid good money to own the handset in the first place.

With Android seemingly unable to keep out of the headlines reporting of malware attacks, one may have expected the Big G’s mobile OS to be the least reliable, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

Having used both on a number of different devices, I certainly wouldn’t have anticipated these results, but with such extensive research, there can be no arguments.

What do you guys think – surprising? Or an affirmation of your suspicions?

Do share with us your thoughts, via the usual mediums below!

(via Forbes)

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