Ryan Haines / Android Authority
Android has long reached a point of maturity where it does a whole lot of things right for most of its user base. However, there’s always room for improvement, and one area that still frustrates me as an Android user is the process of migrating to a new phone. After using the past few generations of iPhones, I’ve noticed how excellently seamless and straightforward Apple’s iPhone migration process is, and it’s one of the first things I miss when I switch back to Android flagships. Google, it’s 2026, and it’s high time you copied Apple’s simplicity in migration.
What do you think about Android's backup and restore process? 83 votes It’s perfect: Everything transfers exactly as it was on my old phone. 22 % It’s good, but imperfect: Most things move over, but I still have to log into apps. 52 % It’s hit-or-miss: It works well within the same brand, but breaks across different ones. 18 % It’s broken: I’ve lost photos, messages, or data during a transfer. 8 %
Apple gets iPhone-to-iPhone transfers just right
Aamir Siddiqui / Android Authority
If you’re jumping between Android and iOS, you’ll have a headache-inducing experience. But for Apple users who are switching from one iPhone to another iPhone, Apple has made the data transfer experience mind-bogglingly easy.
You have to place your new iPhone next to your old one, and iOS will transfer practically everything by itself — including messages, photos, all your apps and their sign-in states (really!!!), your passwords, your home screen, and everything else. It’s like you barely put your old phone down and picked it up again.
The first time I experienced an iPhone-to-iPhone transfer, it felt like magic in a way that my past Android-to-Android experiences had never even come close to. Every time I switched my primary Android phone, it would invariably involve spending a few hours setting everything back up. I didn’t have to spend any time setting up the new iPhone beyond its migration screens, and that left me speechless.
Part of what makes this magic possible is that all iPhones run iOS. Apple tightly controls the ecosystem, ensuring near-perfect compatibility even if both phones aren’t on the latest iOS version. An Android-to-Android transfer can be between Samsung, Google, OnePlus, or many other Android phone brands, each with its own software quirks, adding more rough edges and points of failure. Adding the complexities of backward compatibility, it becomes clear why perfection may be difficult to achieve in this area. But that’s not a concern for the end user, as they still experience frustration.
iPhone-to-iPhone migration feels like magic, in a way that Android-to-Android migration never does.
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