Android is an OS. It competes with iOS.

The LG Revolution is a phone. It competes with the iPhone.

Android is a fine OS. The LG Revolution is crap. In terms of hardware failure, the manufacturer means more than the software.

What you say is true.

I’m just not sure why that makes the comparison bad?

It's not a meaningful scientific basis for such a comparison. Choice of OS isn't a major factor in hardware quality. Nokia proves this; the N8 (Symbian), N9 (MeeGo), and Lumia 800 (WinPhone) are all of fairly similar quality (quite high, I might say); yet each runs a totally different operating system. Likewise, you can have two Android phones from different manufacturers (or even the same, in some cases) that are at very different extremes of hardware quality. A study such as [1] is far more meaningful, it's comparing manufacturer to manufacturer (the people responsible for putting the phones together) instead of OS to OS (as one phone could theoretically be sold with a different OS with no change in quality).

[1] http://www.squaretrade.com/pages/cell-phone-comparison-study...

I still don’t see why this is not a valid comparison. Sure, hardware is independent from software (more or less) but that doesn’t mean you can’t meaningfully compare the two.

It does mean you can't meaningfully compare the two.

Are you saying that if people started installing Android onto iPhones (if it were possible) all of a sudden the hardware failure rates for iPhones would sky rocket?

Of course not! Why would you think that?

All this says is that devices running Android fail on average more often than iPhones – for whatever reason (regression to the mean, one designer and manufacturer vs many, lower priced devices, and so on). That’s a perfectly valid comparison.

The comparison is invalid because iPhone/Blackberry devices are premium high cost devices with high quality control. A direct comparison will only work against other premium high cost devices with high quality control.

By comparing every Android phone on the market (from cheap to premium) to only premium devices you are always going to get a skewed result.

I don’t understand. Why does that make the comparison invalid? That makes no sense at all.

You are naming one factor that might explain the difference – but that is exactly the point of such comparisons! To figure out what the difference is!

There one phone with iOS so if the context is phones, "Android competes with iOS" is exactly equivalent to "Android competes with iPhone".

Which has almost no meaning, because Android is an OS which runs on a wide array of devices from a wide array of manufacturers spreading the gamut of price points and hardware quality. To make a meaningful comparison, you need to limit your selection to devices that actually compete against each other.

Actually you can. One is comparing the software, and the other is comparing the hardware.

That's not what most people have in mind when they talk about Android vs. iPhone (not IOS!) and you know it.

What does it say about people who have to tweak numbers to get the results they want to be true?

But there's no such thing as "Android hardware". There's hardware that runs Android. This hardware is of varying quality. It's not meaningful to lump all of that hardware together.

But if you're talking about software OS marketshare, it is meaningful to talk about Android as a whole.