According to V.P. of Marketing Tim Deluca-Smith at wireless service firm WDS, “Android is a bit of the Wild West” when it comes to handset reliability. Their recent study covering 600,000 technical support calls they took from customers in America, South Africa, Australia, and Europe shows higher percentages of hardware failures in various Android phones than in their RIM Blackberry or Apple iPhone counterparts.
This conclusion would generally agree with data released by SquareTrade last year that indicated approximately a 2.2 percent failure rate within the first year of ownership for Apple iPhone 4 and 3GS models (with similar rates for Motorola phones, and a little under 4 percent for HTC phones) versus a 6.7 percent failure rate overall for other smartphones. Interestingly though, SquareTrade did find the Blackberry to be only slightly better than the average, with a 6.3 percent failure rate.
SquareTrade clarified that first year phone failures included accidents in which phones were dropped, and they found this to be the reason for more first year iPhone failures than for the other phones they studied. Meanwhile, the Blackberry was one of the least likely to break after a fall, despite having the number of failures they counted.
Overall, both of these studies suggest that the lack of control over production of the actual hardware running the Android platform leads to higher failure rates for Android phones on the whole. Higher-end Android phones produced by major manufacturers such as Motorola, however, aren’t really shown to contribute to those statistics.
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