Year 2020 started with the fear of pandemic induced economic recession. But it seems technology domain was less unaffected than expected. Reason for this is the increased dependency on technology. This increase in demand reflected in the number of bug reports Finotes handled in 2020. Finotes captured 464 Million bug reports which is 45 times the count for 2019.
We analysed the bug types to get an understanding about the common issues reported in mobile apps. We decided to share this data to help developers to focus more on such issues and to improve the quality of mobile apps.
Bug stats for iOS apps
In 2020 Finotes captured 138 Million bug reports from 624 iOS apps built on Objective C or Swift. This is from an install base of 1.3M devices.
API related bugs are the most common bugs in iOS and contribute 42.9% of all issues reported, followed by memory leaks at 25%. Crashes contribute 14.3% of bugs. Frame skips came next at 9.5%.
Bug stats for Android apps
Finotes captured 324 Million bug reports in 2020 from 1853 android apps built on Java or Kotlin. Total install base is 2.1M devices.
Memory leaks are the most common bugs in android and contribute 29.7% of all issues reported, followed by screen load delays at 25.4%. Crashes contribute 23.7%% of bugs. API bugs are at 9.5%.
Conclusion
While we do not claim this to be an exact representation of state of mobile app bugs across millions of apps out there, this data has some clear indicators. Higher density of memory related bugs is a major concern, and one of the reasons is that a good number of the memory leaks go unnoticed during development phase. API bugs and crashes are issues that could be identified before going in production, but looks like a not so small number of them make it to live apps.