The grass is always greener on the other smartphone

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It’s been said a million times, and I’ll just briefly touch on it again: both platforms are fantastic in very different ways. Android wins on notifications, general Google integration (obviously), and home screen experience. iOS wins on fluidity, apps, and camera quality. There are many more pros and cons here on both sides, but I’ll spare you; you’ve heard them all before.

The problem is that, as my colleague and friend Vlad Savov touched on in a June editorial, platform-exclusive features grow better and more important with each passing year. Choosing this incredible iPhone 6 Plus means being left out of Android Wear — the Moto 360, specifically. Choosing this gorgeous ebony wood Moto X means losing iMessage, FaceTime, and Continuity, which I’m really excited about. I enjoy FaceTimes with my family in Michigan, and iMessage is a better messaging experience than SMS for a whole slew of reasons. Sure, there are many great third-party messaging platforms, but everyone I know uses iMessage because they were silently and seamlessly subsumed into it. Users are the killer feature.

And there’s the fact that notifications are still, somehow, a dumpster fire in iOS 8. It’s 2014, for goodness’ sake.

There’s literally no way to have it all, unless you’re carrying two phones with you — and these monsters have gotten big enough so that there’s no way that’s ever going to happen. Plus, I’m probably going to desperately want whatever phone Google introduces when it rolls out Android "L."

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