14 DAY TRIAL // If you’re wondering why your just-upgraded iPhone 4S isn’t running as smoothly as it used to, you might want to take a look at these numbers released by Crittercism, a company that specializes in mobile application performance management (APM).
Crittercism offers both error monitoring and service monitoring solutions. They’ve been looking at iOS 8 installations and they recorded significantly higher crash rates with iOS 8 than they did with iOS 7.
So, where are the crashes coming from?
The reason isn’t certain. They dished out a chart (pictured above and to the right) revealing that the iOS 8 crash rate for all devices that support the firmware is 3.56%, which is about 78 percent higher than with iOS 7.
Crashes usually tend to involve apps that haven’t been optimized for the OS they’re running on, but that doesn’t exonerate Apple from any bugs they may have forgotten to squash during their own testing.
Even with such a high discrepancy between iOS 8 and iOS 7 numbers, the 3.56% crash rate is still well within the boundaries of normality. All-new software tends to be buggy regardless of the vendor or the device type. It’s just a given. In fact, it’s pretty darn rare to see a major new OS roll out and get a flawless experience from it.
What's fair is fair
What you can safely blame on Apple is the broken cellular reception and Touch ID issues from iOS 8.0.1. That’s something they have no excuse for.
According to a support document they put out earlier today, the company is already working on iOS 8.0.2 to fix those issues, and probably some others as well.
You can also expect your favorite apps to be brought up to speed in the following days or weeks (hopefully not months), as their creators are playing catch with the code strings in iOS 8.
Just wait and see
Again, it’s nothing out of the ordinary and it’s certainly not worth bothering your head with. Just let the developers work their magic, and whenever you see an update badge pop up on your display, follow it and install what’s new.
As for Crittercism’s numbers, you shouldn’t put too much faith in those either. For starters, their chart includes iPhone 4 as an iOS 8-compatible device. In reality, the oldest phone to support iOS 8 is iPhone 4S.
Secondly, just look at how people love to tarnish Apple in the news. Droid lovers and pretty much everyone who isn’t in the Apple camp today are just begging for the company to slip up so they can pull out their CAD machines and create parody ads. Just be patient and enjoy your new iPhone.