Blancco: Refurbished Android phones lack performance, iPhones miss connectivity

The mobile device repair analyst company Blannco has just published its report on the refurbished smartphone market. According to the company, Samsung phones are the ones that come in for repairs most often, but that's hardly a surprise, given how the Korean company has by far the largest market share among all Android makers. The second place for Xiaomi is a bit more surprising with 14.2% - suggesting that the Mi and Redmi phones fail more often on average.

Top 10 Android devices by Failure Rate

Apple devices are in a separate category and the data there shows that the iPhone 6 and 6s are the most unreliable, having more than twice the number of failures compared to their Plus versions. So if you are getting a refurbished iOS phone and plan on keeping it for a long time you might want to avoid these two.

Top 10 iOS phones by Failure Rate

Blancco points out that Android phones are most likely to be plagued by performance issues (34% of the cases), followed by camera problems(14%). Other bits that you might want to double check before buying a second hand phone are microphone, battery charging and speaker.

Apple devices have completely different issues, mostly related with connectivity. The iOS phones had trouble with the Bluetooth (9%), Wi-Fi (8%), followed by the headset, mobile data and receiver. None of them were in the Top 5 last year, when diagnosed iPhones were most often found to lose RAM, CPU and storage performance.

Source