Android vs. IOS: a comparative analysis over mobile operator infrastructures based on crowdsourced mobile dataset

Abstract

User equipment (UE)’s operating system (OS) and category types are important factors that are affecting the end-user performance in a given mobile network operator (MNO)’s infrastructure. For this reason, fair and statistically accurate observed network performance differences of UE’s OSs based on category types, MNOs or locations can be of interest for mobile telecommunication ecosystem players. This paper’s focus is on performance comparisons of UE OSs (including Android, IOS (iPhone Operating System) and Windows phones) over different UE categories, MNOs and locations based on previously collected end-to-end nationwide crowd-sourced data measurements in Turkey. The analysis results performed in this paper uses statistical comparisons of unpaired observations due to imbalance between number of observations between all OSs and yield insight on how the mobile OS types’ network performances differ using some important Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as downlink (DL) speed, latency, jitter and packet loss (PL). The outcome of the analysis indicate that Android devices perform better in terms of DL speed among all MNOs, whereas IOS devices are better in terms of latency values. On the other hand depending on the UE category, the performances of MNOs may vary when IOS and Android OSs are compared based on different KPIs. Additionally, IOS has shown better performance than Android in large geographical areas of Turkey. Finally, the business aspects of performing the proposed statistical OS comparisons from the perspectives of OS developers, MNOs, device manufacturers, and end-users are highlighted.