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

iOS 8 marks a strong leap forward for the iPhone. It doesn't offer the graphical overhaul that iOS 7 did, but Apple made key improvements throughout the operating system. Expect better photo tools, customizable interfaces, and cloud storage – all features ostensibly available with Android. So how do the two rivals stack up? What did Apple invent? What did it borrow? And in what ways is iOS 8 better or worse than Android?

Apple
iOS 8, released on Wednesday, September 17, 2014 features a new "Recents" tab that gives quick access to all recent contacts.

1. Photo editing

Clinton Nguyen
iOS 8 expanded heavily on photo editing features, allowing users to modify specific parts of a photo: levels, contrast, saturation, crop, among many other things.

iOS 8 has expanding its on-the-fly photo-editing options, allowing users to make adjustments that were formerly limited to dedicated photo-editing apps such as VSCO and Litely.

Android has had a similar built-in photo editor since 2011 with its Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) update. iOS 8 finally brings feature parity between the two systems.

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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.”

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