What can be learned from 100 million bugs from mobile apps? Instabug, a company that provides bug and crash reporting, has analyzed all the bugs captured since it was founded in 2012.

Instabug has been providing its service to mobile app developers since 2012 and the rate at which it has discovered bugs has increased over time. As the chart below shows, it reached the milestone of 100 million bugs earlier this year. 

These bugs, from 50,000 Instabug accounts, came from over a billion devices in 15 billion sessions. They were amassed from 30,000 apps from a range of publishers including indie developers, side projects, startups, software houses, unicorns, and public companies and over app categories including games, business, education, and lifestyle. 

Instabug detects errors in apps so that they can be resolved. Its report claims:  

Bugs discovered through Instabug are most likely to be resolved within 24 hours of being reported.

This isn't the same as saying that the majority of bugs are resolved with a day. In fact less than 1.6% of bugs are resolved in a day and only around 5% are resolved in a week or less. Over 2.5% take over 30 days and if Instabug's stats are correct almost 90% of tickets were never closed. 

However, of bugs resolved within a day, the largest proportion (around 3.6%) are closed within an hour.

Looking into patterns in the bugs discovered, Instabug finds a clear relationship between bugs and build frequency. Noting the industry’s move toward Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment, Instabug's data shows that the largest share of apps, almost half, have a release schedule on a weekly basis, followed by bi-weekly, then monthly with less than 10% on a longer basis.

The shorter the release cycle, the more bugs are present, with almost 70% of bugs in apps with weekly builds. Instabug gives a few explanations for this:

One is more code, more bugs. Another is that these are often beta builds, which are buggier by nature given quick turnaround times. In addition, apps that iterate weekly often include new features, which likely contain bugs, or bug fixes, which are constant.

In terms of absolute numbers of bugs two-thirds are in iOS devices and only a third are in Android. However, this is because Instabug is used more in the iOS environment. When you factor in bugs per user iOS account for just over half.

In terms of device manufacturer LG appears to makes the buggiest phones, with around 3.3 bugs per user. However, the report notes:

The high proportion of bugs/user reported from LG phones is most likely due to internal beta testing by developers.

In other words, you need not to take the results at face value, but allow for the fact that bugs can be an integral part of building a robust app.

More Information

Instabug Report - State of Mobile App Quality 2018

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