Once released into the wild, apps have to cope with whatever operating systems throw at them. This infographic starts from the premise that it's a war-zone and looks at what can be done to encourage loyalty.

It comes from Crittercism a mobile app performance management (APM) solution that offers a real-time global view of app diagnostics and app crashes. It monitors across iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8, Hybrid and HTML5 and claims 35 billion app loads.

Quoting a recent report from Gartner which predicts that by 2016 mobile app stores will reach 310 billion downloads and $74 billion in revenue, Crittercism argues:

It is more critical than ever to ensure mobile apps are operating effectively and that developers have greater visibility into the many variables that cause crashes, and therefore affect user retention.

Using statistics collected in October 2012, the infographic reports on the best and worst performing versions of iOS and Android on crash rates. Overall it records an average daily crash rate of 1.76% for Android compared to 1.98% for iOS.

The worst performing operating systems were Android 2.3.1 and iOS 4 while Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) and iOS 5.0.1 came out best.

Another interesting statistic was that while 66% of iOS users have adopted the latest version, iOS6, only 4.75% of Android users have adopted Jelly Bean.

 Click to enlarge

Top 10 Smartphone Apps 2012