Study Finds Samsung’s Phones Fail More Often Than Any iPhone

Samsung Failure Rate Vs Iphone Credit: Nebojsa Markovic / Shutterstock
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The iPhone 6 is the Apple flagship that is the likeliest to fail — but not as likely as Samsung devices — according to the results of a new study.

Security and data erasure firm Blancco released a new report this month titled “State of mobile Device Repair & Security” that took a look at the failure rate of popular smartphones. That is, how likely a device is to be brought in for repairs.

The report singled out Apple devices in their own category and ranked them based on their failure rate.

What Blancco found was that the iPhone 6 was the most likely Apple handset to fail at about 22 percent. The iPhone 6s came in second with a 16 percent failure rate.

The rest of the iPhone lineup ranked in the single digits, with the iPhone 6s Plus garnering a 9 percent failure rate. The study looked at flagship iPhone devices stretching back to the iPhone 5s — but it curiously omitted the iPhone SE and the iPhone 8.

Apple’s latest devices might be the least likely to fail, as the iPhone X and iPhone 8 Plus both scored a 3 percent failure rate. To be fair, that could be due to the relative newness of the devices. But it’s interesting that the older iPhone 5s had a lower failure rate than the iPhone 6.

Blancco also noted that users have reported the latest iOS updates have negatively impacted the iPhone 6’s battery life.

As far as which issues were most likely to plague iPhones, the report found that Bluetooth was the most common problem, followed by Wi-Fi, the headset, and mobile data.

But even Apple’s most commonly failing handset did better than its closest competitor: Samsung.

Among Android manufacturers, Samsung devices had the highest failure rate at 27.4 percent.

Xiaomi came in second with 14.2 percent, and Motorola rounded out the top three with 9.6 percent.

Longcheer, Lenovo and OnePlus were the least likely to fail for Android OEMs, since none of them broke the 3 percent mark.

The security firm also tracked how common it was for device users to be running the latest version of their respective operating systems.

Unsurprisingly, Apple ranked high with a reported 74.3 percent of devices running iOS 11. By contrast, 50 percent of Android users were still running Nougat — a version of the Android OS released back in 2016.

Of course, as with any study, it’s important to note where the data came from. Blancco said that it gathered this data from iOS and Android devices that were brought to wireless carriers and smartphone makers for “Blancco testing and erasure.”

Because of that, the data set might not be representative of all Android or iOS devices or operating systems. Still, it’s an enlightening look at the smartphone repair world that we might not see that often.

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