Report: Gingerbread has highest crash rate for Android, while iOS 7.1 is most stable iOS version

Crittercism, a performance monitoring company best known for crash reports, has come up with its first-ever ‘State of Mobile’ report that extrapolates data from their one billion monthly active users to show a variety of mobile app performance metrics.

The report found that Gingerbread has the highest crash rate for Android at 1.7 percent — more than double that of KitKat, Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean, all of which crash at about 0.7 percent. In the meantime, iOS 7.1 has a crash rate of 1.6 percent, lower than iOS 7.0 (2.1 percent) and iOS 6 (2.5 percent).

This means that quite a number of mobile users are experiencing less-than-stellar performance. According to the latest Google update, 19 percent of Android users are still stuck with Gingerbread, with 62 percent using Jelly Bean and 15.2 percent on Ice Cream Sandwich. For iOS adoption, the latest figures show that iOS 7 has now hit the 85 percent mark — though there’s no breakdown of how iOS 7.1 is beind adopted — while iOS 6 stands at 12 percent.

In terms of devices, the iPhone 5 crashes the least of any iPhone, while Samsung takes the top spot in stability for both Android mobile phones and tablets — though no specific devices were named.

The report also found that 47 percent of apps crash more than one percent of the time, while 32 percent of apps have a crash rate over two percent. Among apps, games tend to perform the worst with a crash rate of 4.4 percent, twice as often compared to any other category. Photo and video apps take second spot with a crash rate of about 1.8 percent, while e-commerce apps are the most reliable with a crash rate of just 0.4 percent.

As for specific app performance, Twitter, Facebook and Flurry have the longest response times ranging from 574 to 750 milliseconds, while Google Analytics, Cloudfront and Admob have the shortest ranging from 237 to 389 milliseconds.

Headline image via Etnyk/Flickr