Some thoughts about my experience getting my parents' new devices up and running, and how bad it keeps getting today.
Update: A lot of Hacker News visitors this time around, if you feel like I bought my parents the wrong phones, feel free to donate, so I get them better devices with GrapheneOS (or just iPhones I guess?) next time! It would be fun to write about their experience using them… no promises though!
This is just a joke, but I would appreciate the support, feel free to look around the rest of my website :3
As I shared on previous posts, my dad and mom acquired new devices, the same model, but with quite different uses!
Regardless, as the more tech-savvy member of the family, the responsibility to set them up fell upon me, having to deal with a lot of progress indicators, toggles asking me to track everything the phone does, and logging in to a online accounts, because that’s how these things go now for regular people.
Many years ago, this blogpost could have been quite different, I may be mentioning some nifty program that can easily back up things and transfer them to the next device.
Especially when I used custom ROMs and root utilities to do all the heavy lifting, I often loved setting up my device again and again every few months. Even getting a new one wasn’t bad at all when I knew I’d eventually use it how I want.
But as time goes on Android has been more locked down, and I have to admit I haven’t caught up with recent backup tools that deal with all that—Even less so when my parents have phones that I can’t really root.
At the very least, the backup tools by OEM’s have caught up quite well, if at the cost of my peace of mind.
I must admit I didn’t do that much this time around. Just the bare minimum list of the things that I had to change.
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