Android hardware fails more than iPhone, BlackBerry | Hacker News Reader

Android hardware fails more than iPhone, BlackBerry

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15 pointsgadgetsrule47 comments

It's meaningless to say "Android" hardware fails more often v. Apple iPhones and RIM Blackberrys; such a statement is like saying sedans fail more often v. BMW M3s and Toyota RAV4s. Apple and RIM are single companies, Android phones are produced by dozens. "LG hardware [or even "LG Android phones"] fails more often than iPhone, Blackberry", for instance, would be a far more useful study.

"Android" is a brand. Phones of this brand fail more often. Why is that a meaningless statement?

Because it's a software brand, not a hardware brand.

It's a software brand defined by being "open" and thus freely available for shitty hardware producers to use on their shitty products.

And equally available for quality hardware producers to use on their quality products. iOS and Blackberry OS are available for Apple's and RIM's use only.

@tadfisher, looks like there are way more crappy Android phones out there than high quality ones.

And this statement, while valid and testable under some definition of "crappy", has nothing to do with comparing hardware quality between manufacturers. This reminds me of the smear campaigns Apple used to wage against beige boxes, nevermind the sheer diversity of hardware running Windows and the homogeneity of Macs.

Android is a "platform" brand.

That's a cop-out. I bet you're totally OK with people saying "Android is destroying iPhone in the marketplace!". You can't have it both ways.

Actually you can. One is comparing the software, and the other is comparing the hardware.

That's not what most people have in mind when they talk about Android vs. iPhone (not IOS!) and you know it.

What does it say about people who have to tweak numbers to get the results they want to be true?

But there's no such thing as "Android hardware". There's hardware that runs Android. This hardware is of varying quality. It's not meaningful to lump all of that hardware together.

But if you're talking about software OS marketshare, it is meaningful to talk about Android as a whole.

Android is an OS. It competes with iOS.

The LG Revolution is a phone. It competes with the iPhone.

Android is a fine OS. The LG Revolution is crap. In terms of hardware failure, the manufacturer means more than the software.

There one phone with iOS so if the context is phones, "Android competes with iOS" is exactly equivalent to "Android competes with iPhone".

Which has almost no meaning, because Android is an OS which runs on a wide array of devices from a wide array of manufacturers spreading the gamut of price points and hardware quality. To make a meaningful comparison, you need to limit your selection to devices that actually compete against each other.

What you say is true.

I’m just not sure why that makes the comparison bad?

It's not a meaningful scientific basis for such a comparison. Choice of OS isn't a major factor in hardware quality. Nokia proves this; the N8 (Symbian), N9 (MeeGo), and Lumia 800 (WinPhone) are all of fairly similar quality (quite high, I might say); yet each runs a totally different operating system. Likewise, you can have two Android phones from different manufacturers (or even the same, in some cases) that are at very different extremes of hardware quality. A study such as [1] is far more meaningful, it's comparing manufacturer to manufacturer (the people responsible for putting the phones together) instead of OS to OS (as one phone could theoretically be sold with a different OS with no change in quality).

[1] http://www.squaretrade.com/pages/cell-phone-comparison-study...

I still don’t see why this is not a valid comparison. Sure, hardware is independent from software (more or less) but that doesn’t mean you can’t meaningfully compare the two.

It does mean you can't meaningfully compare the two.

Are you saying that if people started installing Android onto iPhones (if it were possible) all of a sudden the hardware failure rates for iPhones would sky rocket?

Of course not! Why would you think that?

All this says is that devices running Android fail on average more often than iPhones – for whatever reason (regression to the mean, one designer and manufacturer vs many, lower priced devices, and so on). That’s a perfectly valid comparison.

The comparison is invalid because iPhone/Blackberry devices are premium high cost devices with high quality control. A direct comparison will only work against other premium high cost devices with high quality control.

By comparing every Android phone on the market (from cheap to premium) to only premium devices you are always going to get a skewed result.

I don’t understand. Why does that make the comparison invalid? That makes no sense at all.

You are naming one factor that might explain the difference – but that is exactly the point of such comparisons! To figure out what the difference is!

No it's a perfectly valid comparison. it's like saying cars made in Detroit fail more often than cars made by BMW. Android is widely considered as a low-quality OS running on low-quality hardware. Android's strength (ubiquity) is also its weakness (it runs on crap hardware).

Android is software, not hardware. This post is complaining about hardware, but somehow blaming software instead.

Android is not just software, it's a platform. If the hardware is low-quality, that's still an Android issue.

I would say the comparison is more like saying windows laptops have hardware failures more than Mac laptops. That is probably a true statement, but I bet that is affected by a few crappy manufacturers. When you compare an OS with a hardware platform it is just silly. I think this kind of lame comparison is a sign of either fear or sour grapes. Reassuring for Android in a way.

I'd like to see this broken down by manufacturer and model. Without that, all this tells us is "some Android phones are cheaply made", which is to be expected for an OS designed to be cheap and easy to put on hardware.

As I told the other poster; If you start doing this with Android "sales" as well then all will be good. At the moment when people talk about how is "winning" it's always the whole of Android vs. iPhone. Given that I think this report is perfectly acceptable.

Whether or not Android is "winning" has nothing to do with hardware reliability, which is the subject of this article. I'd personally like to see the reliability numbers broken out by OEM.

Right. This article isn't about who's "winning"; it's just a reminder that the benefit of hardware choice means that information is needed to make a good choice. Longer-term reliability information is more difficult to obtain than basic specifications, but it's still important.

The Android fanboy behavior in this thread is absolutely appalling. People point out the logical inconsistency in wanting to lump Android together when it's a positive and split out when it's a negative and the result is mass downvotes? Disgusting. I'm at -5 on some of my posts. I wouldn't get that for calling someone a fucking asshole.

Some of you need to go reread pg's essay on ID.

I see plenty of well-reasoned responses to your claim of an inconsistency. Perhaps you need to learn that someone who disagrees with you is not automatically a "fanboy", and their responses to your claims are not automatically "appalling".

The downvotes, however, are not warranted.

You need to read what I wrote. I don't care about people disagreeing with me! I care that my posts got massive downvotes. I wasn't snarky or anything, I was stating what I see as an inconsistency and fanboys responded by just voting down all my posts.

I'm not calling people who see it differently than I fanboys.

You seem to be trying to make some kind of wider point about "Android fanboys", and in so doing you're accusing people of making statements about Android sales that they haven't made, and are irrelevant to the OP.

In reality, all I pointed out was that a report about hardware failure should come with statistics broken down by hardware manufacturer. The other "Android fanboys" that you're similarly decrying said the same. Your point would be valid if we were also saying, at the same time, that good and crappy Android phones put together beat Apple. Which we aren't. This isn't about Android "winning" or "losing"; it's about failing hardware, which is highly relevant for anyone selecting a phone, regardless of whatever ideological position one might take WRT smartphone software.

>The other "Android fanboys" that you're similarly decrying said the same.

No, the people I'm calling "Android fanboys" are the people who mass-downvoted me for stating something they didn't want to hear. On reddit I would expect this and go with it. It's appalling to see that kind of thing happening here.

You didn't respond to my point, which is that you're derailing the comment thread by accusing people of saying things they didn't say. That's a perfectly legitimate reason to downvote a comment, and it has nothing to do with being an "Android fanboy".

This thread is the perfect example of why I don't participate on HN as much as I do other communities. HN has great articles but the FOSS extremists run the comments.

1. Repeated articles proclaim: Android overtakes the iPhone in sales. What does this mean? It means that Apple is selling less of 1 phone model than dozens of hardware manufacturers combined sell different phone models. So I guess Android fans want Android to be thought of as "one platform", all hardware vendors included.

2. New article: Android hardware fails more than Apple iPhone (and Blackberry, et. al.) but suddenly "YOU CAN'T DO THAT, YOU CAN'T COMPARE ALL ANDROID PHONES WITH ONE PHONE."

So, which is it? I figured this out a long time ago. The answer is it's whatever makes Android look better than iOS as a platform. The facts can change daily, just as long as Android is the winner.

This is exactly right. Anything Google-related has a similar problem. Android/Google is to HN as militant atheist is to reddit.

Assuming that some hardware is of lesser quality than other hardware, and given the low cost (down to virtually free) of many Android devices, I'd expect more failures per unit.

Of course, it's entirely possible that certain Android devices have lower failure rates than their iPhone and BlackBerry peers. The study doesn't break it down by device.

If you don't want to think about it, then just choose a BlackBerry, with its 6% rate.

Can we agree that when the customer goes out and buys an Android it's more likely his phone will fail than say when he goes out and buys BB or iPhone.

I think we can agree on that.

Of course, not many customers go out and search for "Android" phones. They buy the Galaxy from Samsung, the Droid from Motorola, the EVO from HTC.

Most non-tech people I know either don't know what Android is, or they treat it as a quality of a smartphone, such as "1GB RAM". If a smartphone says Android in the description it usually means they can continue to use the apps they used on their old device.

Android phone repair costs carriers billions: study 'At the moment, Android is a bit of the Wild West,' says expert

Costly hardware failures are more common on Android devices than on Apple iPhones and Research In Motion BlackBerry phones, which have strict control over the components used in their devices

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45150844/ns/technology_and_scien...

I was going to post this as a reply, but every thread here so far is talking about this.

Saying that "Android is the larget smartphone platform" is not in contradiction with the statement that it's unfair to treat all Android devices equally. Nexus devices are superior to other devices in terms of consistency, speed of updates and reliability. Sense and Blur laden devices are less likely to be updated and are historically buggier.

It makes sense to lump Android together to talk about a software platform because those are the statistics that matter to mobile developers. They want to know where the users are. When it comes to phone, saying "Android phones fail more often", is only one abstract level above saying "Smartphones fail more often than dumb phones.".

While it's a true statement, it's not a complete statement. It seems to make sense to distinguish between manufacturers of Android phones when making these kinds of statements in my mind.

Note, I have no problem with this sort of an aggregate report. There just seems to be a lot of "AHA" and "Gotcha", by talking about Android as a brand and pointing out that Android is considered an "aggregate" for platform size comparisons.

> It makes sense to lump Android together to talk about a software platform because those are the statistics that matter to mobile developers. They want to know where the users are.

Not all Android phones are created equal - many have inferior hardware (which developers have to account for separately) and others are only capable of running ancient Android releases (which developers have to account for separately). I'm not sure a developer who is looking at bulk data for the Android platform is getting an accurate picture of the effort/payoff for developing an Android app.

Right, which is why there is also data available for what devices are on what versions and what percentages of users on what versions so that developers can choose a minimum level to target. This problem isn't unique to Android either, so I don't see how it changes what I siad.

Come on people, at least explain your rationale

Yeah, but you're saying it makes sense for developers to consider Android to be one software platform when looking at marked numbers. I'm pointing out that this is just not true. It's much easier with iOS, for example, because unless you're targeting very old hardware you can assume everyone is running iOS 4 or 5 (or soon will be), and the screen size is universally the same across iPhones.

If you consider Android a single platform, then the Apple platform should be iOS (including the iPad and iPod touch), but most comparisons of phone numbers don't take these into account at all (for good reason IMHO).

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