iOS 8 vs. Android: 8 ways Apple is catching up or pulling ahead

iOS 8 is here. What did Apple invent? What did it borrow from Android? And in what ways is iOS 8 better or worse than its big rival?

7. Messaging

Clinton Nguyen
The Messaging app was updated to allow users to reply from their lock screen. Replying no longer exits you from the app you were on before.

The messaging app was updated to include a microphone icon where the send button used to be. That allows the user to record a voice message, completing the circle of sendable media: text, voice, video, and photo.

This was already present a while ago on Facebook Messenger since its last major revamp in late October 2013. Save for one feature, the Messages update was truly just a game of catchup: sending your location. While tagging your messages with your current location has been a feature in Facebook Messenger since mid–2012, it’s been absent from Android’s stock messages app.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The Christian Science Church, and we’ve always been transparent about that.

The Church publishes the Monitor because it sees good journalism as vital to progress in the world. Since 1908, we’ve aimed “to injure no man, but to bless all mankind,” as our founder, Mary Baker Eddy, put it.

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