  Smartphones are becoming necessary tools in the daily lives of mil-lions of
users who rely on these devices and their applications. There are thou-sands of
applications for smartphone devices such as the iPhone, Blackberry, and
Android, thus their reliability has become paramount for their users. This work
aims to answer two related questions: (1) Can we assess the reliability of
mobile applications by using the traditional reliability models? (2) Can we
model adequately the failure data collected from many users? Firstly, it has
been proved that the three most used software reliability models have fallen
short of the mark when applied to smartphone applications; their failures were
traced back to specific features of mobile applications. Secondly, it has been
demonstrated that the Weibull and Gamma distribution models can adequately fit
the observed failure data, thus providing better means to predict the
reliability of smartphone applications.
