If you live in a mixed household—some Apple devices, some Android ones—you know the pain of looking for a charging cable. Not only do you have to find one, you have to find the right one, and good luck lending a charge to your friend, child, or spouse who made different life choices. There could be an end in sight, however. The LMcable promises to work on all your devices, Apple and Android alike.

Launched on Kickstarter (and already thousands of dollars over its goal) the LMcable is simple in its premise. It's a Lightning cable on one side, and a MicroUSB on the other, presumably with a its male portion designed to be thin enough to fit into female ports of either persuasion. No detachable adaptor or dongle necessary!

Yes, this would kill the Lightning cable's super power of never being upside down, but if you have an Android phone and an iPad, or some other mixed device pairing, the tradeoff could be worth it. Here is some video of it in action:

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Looks great, right? Well now it is time for the caveats. First, this is just a Kickstarter, so even if you back it for $15, there's no guarantee that you'll ever actually get one if there are any hitches in production. That, and it might take forever before you do. And by that time, USB Type-C—the new, flippable version of the USB port that's already making its way into Android phones and tablets—will be more ubiquitous than ever. If you get an Android device with one of those, this won't help you at all.

And lastly, there's no guarantee this is good for your ports; we've seen reversible MicroUSBs before, but they ran the risk of damaging your ports when you forced one in. Not to mention you have to be careful with USB cables; cheap ones can fry all your gadgets.

In a perfect world, maybe Apple would just ditch the Lightning port and adopt the USB Type-C port that it has already included on its new Macbook. That way we could truly have a one-cable future. But unless that happens—and while your Android devices still have their MicroUSB ports—this seems like it could be the most versatile charging cable you could ever find.

Source: Kickstarter via Gizmodo

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