FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE · September 23, 2026
Cross-platform categories, single-platform occurrence — evidence from robot-powered testing on real iOS and Android devices.
NEW YORK, Sept. 23, 2026 — Mobot today released its Annual Defect Report, analyzing 6,372 unique defects surfaced over twelve months of robot-powered testing on real iOS and Android devices across a sampling of 83 of our customers’ apps in 11 industries. The report — based on 145,000+ automated test executions and 5.8 million QA actions from July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2026 — finds that mobile quality risk is overwhelmingly cross-platform in category but single-platform in occurrence: the bugs that matter most often appear on only one of the platforms Mobot tested.
Across the dataset, five categories — broken navigation, missing or blank content, login and authentication failures, payment issues, and crashes — accounted for 57% of every defect Mobot surfaced. Four of those categories (navigation, missing content, login, payment) alone covered about half of all findings. Critically, 83% of defects appeared on only one of the platforms we tested; cross-platform bugs never exceeded 28% of any category. Native iOS and Android apps are often separate codebases, so a single-platform finding does not mean the same shared code failed everywhere — it means teams that thoroughly test one OS and spot-check the other systematically under-cover real-device risk.
Of 512 P0 defects in the sampling, crashes and freezes were 46%, login/auth 18%, signup/onboarding 9%, and payment/billing 5%. About a quarter of P0s were “front-door” failures — crash on launch, login that rejects valid credentials, or onboarding that never completes — often found in the first thirty seconds of a real-device run. 85% of P0s appeared on only one of the platforms we tested (48% iOS-only, 37% Android-only, 15% on both). When Mobot catches a P0 on iOS, a matching finding shows up on Android only about 1 in 4 times in paired platform runs — with the caveat that native apps are often separate codebases.
Every industry vertical showed at least one meaningfully over-indexed category. Sharpest uplifts included Social/Dating notifications (3.8× baseline), Travel/Outdoor location (3.7×), Utilities camera/photo (3.6×), and E-commerce location (3.1×). In fintech (13 customers, industry-level aggregation only), 1 in every 5 defects was a payment or billing issue — 239 confirmed payment defects, 2.5× the overall rate. These sit on the critical path of checkout and remittance flows and are among the most consequential issues Mobot surfaces; the report does not attribute individual customer outcomes.
Most common categories sat near the testing baseline (~55% of runs on iOS). Observed exceptions: notification defects skewed iOS by 13 points (iOS-only outnumbering Android-only by more than 2:1) — reported as observed; Mobot is not asserting a single OS permission-model cause. Camera/photo upload skewed Android by 10 points; cart/checkout by 9 points. Separately, Android Play rating and vitals remain a useful secondary consumer-app signal — one proof point alongside iOS skews, not the thesis of the report.
Bugs-per-test-run dropped roughly 40% in months with lower ship volume, while P0 share spiked in some of those months (10%+), reflecting real release cadence rather than synthetic load. Mobot’s platform runs customer-defined test plans on real iPhones and Android devices driven by robotic arms. The full Annual Defect Report is available (gated) at https://www.mobot.io/resources/annual-defect-report. Related analysis: blog post. Demo requests: https://www.mobot.io/schedule-demo.
“Emulators remain useful in the development loop. What they cannot replace is proving the release on the same glass, permissions, and networks your customers use. This year’s data makes the cost of skipping that step concrete,” said Charles Sword, CEO of Mobot.
Mobot (mobot.io / teammobot.com) provides AI-enabled, robot-powered QA on real iOS and Android devices. Mechanical robots execute customer-defined tests, scripts, cases, suites, and queues on physical hardware so teams can catch defects that virtual environments miss. Headquartered in New York and backed by investors including Cota Capital, Heavybit, Uncorrelated Ventures, and Y Combinator.
Media contact: Charles Sword / Eden Full Goh
charles@teammobot.com / eden@teammobot.com
https://www.mobot.io
Download the gated report, or start a free trial to see robots catch single-platform defects on real devices.