Blancco, a mobile device repair analyst company, has published its Q1 2018 report on “ State of Mobile Device Repair and Security.” The report gives an insight into how refurbished smartphones by various manufacturers perform. Learning from the iOS and Android devices brought to Blancco for testing and erasure, the report states that most Android devices exhibit performance issues, while iPhones are plagued by connectivity problems. Additionally, problems in headset/microphone are observed in both, iOS and Android devices in mobile service centers.
The company also points out that Samsung’s devices most often submitted for repairs and have a failure rate of 27.4 percent, followed by Xiaomi with 14.2 percent. As per a Counterpoint Q1 2018 report, Samsung shipped 78 million devices and captured 21.7 percent global market share. Thus more of its devices being sent for repair makes sense. However, Xiaomi coming-in at the second place with 14.2 percent of its devices being sent for repairs is surprising. As per the same counterpoint report, it had 7.5 percent market share in Q1, 2018 and this means that the Chinese manufacturer’s devices failure rate is unexpectedly higher, suggesting that its Mi and Redmi phones are more prone to failure.
“Through data collected from iOS and Android devices brought into wireless carriers and device manufacturers for Blancco testing and erasure, we have learned that mobile retailers and processors should keep a keen eye on Samsung devices, iPhone 6 and 6s models, Android erasure, and camera and menu key issues, among other topics,” concludes Blancco’s report.
The report states that Android phones are most prone to performance issues (34 percent of the cases), followed by problems with the camera (14 percent). The next pain point for Android devices is the microphone, followed by hampered battery charging and speaker functionalities. For Apple phones, there is no problem with the performance. However, most of the issues cropping up on iOS devices are related to connectivity like Bluetooth (9 percent), Wi-Fi and headset (8 percent), followed by mobile data and receiver. Additionally, as per the report, the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6s are Apple’s “Worst-Performing iOS Devices” with a failure rate of around 22 percent and 16 percent respectively.