I've been running Android custom ROMs since Gingerbread days, on HTC HD2. At that time, I'd be flashing nightlies, switching between CyanogenMod and Paranoid Android, kernels, getting bootloops.
Setting up the phone was no big deal - most apps could be backed up with Titanium Backup, few that couldn't (e.g. banking) would just get redownloaded and I'd log in immediately. I was also still a student back then and had more time to tinker, but if it was anything like it is now, I would've given up much quicker.
In the last year I had to do few clean flashes with changing my phone, then updating LineageOS, and once the phone just wiped itself for no reason. Backups don't work for most apps - even if you can get one, they'll crash without a specific reason. 2FA everywhere is mostly security theater, with apps that have no business keeping my data but insisting on it, using SMS, email, authenticators, selfies. Banking apps needing two layers of root detection circumvention (because a custom ROM is already problematic, so you need root to stop them from detecting an unlocked bootloader, and then again not to detect root). Google insisting on sending a security check notification to a phone that's just been wiped with no ability to confirm that it's really you from your PC (but if you give it few minutes, it will give in and let you verify with SMS), always feels like hacking yourself.
It's a massive pain already on a clean, bloatware-free custom ROM, with a truly minimum app list. Once you need to start debloating the official OS, it's another hour or three, depending if they're nice and let you uninstall things or if you need adb access to disable offending packages.
I found that TiBackup was both the secret sauce that allowed for playing with ROMs with impunity, and also my primary reason for rooting phones back in the day even when I was just using phones in stock form.
It was the first app I ever spent money on, and I did so without any hesitation at all.
It was just genuinely useful to be able to back up and restore my own data on my own devices, and to do so on my own accord. It was a process that I owned, and controlled, and if it went wrong somehow then I was able to troubleshoot it and make sensible decisions.
I haven't had a rooted phone in a decade or so now. These days, backups allegedly happen -- somehow -- and the entire process seems to be both deliberately and inscrutably shrouded in mystery.
When I switch devices or reset to factory to try to fix an eSIM issue (or whatever I do that makes restoration a useful path today), then it's never clear before I start whether the backup/restore will magically work or if it will simply fail without recourse. The uncertainty demonstrates a reprehensibly terrible way to deal with backups.
“Phones” in the title is doing lots of heavy lifting. “Android phones” is the key missing piece.
I love Free software too, and I wish I could run more of my life on it, but it’s no longer my hobby. I like cars, too, but I don’t work on a hobby car. The author’s experience is why I use proprietary stuff like Apple for these parts of my life. A new Apple device is usually a non-event: charge it, authenticate, wait for the back to restore while you go about your business.
The cost of more freedom (in this case, from proprietary toolchains and data lakes) is needing to exercise more control (compiling custom Android images). I just, honest to god, don’t want to spend the time on it. A kid, a house, cats, getting old. I like that someone else has solved multi-device backup and restore, and I feel happy watching it happen so perfectly, even if I’m not the one controlling it.
> I use proprietary stuff like Apple for these parts of my life. A new Apple device is usually a non-event: charge it, authenticate, wait for the back to restore while you go about your business.
Most of the author's criticisms were centered on avoiding account creation and third-party apps. I'm not sure I would give Apple the benefit of the doubt here since the motivations are different: Apple is far more interested in locking customers into their own ecosystem. On the Android front, that isn't all that different from getting a Pixel. Of course, getting an Android based Samsung adds an extra company who wants to do the same as well as selling space to third parties.
While Android being more open does add complexity, it is mostly limited to those who buy devices produced by another vendor or those who choose to exercise their freedom (e.g. by choosing to install a third-party version of Android, or installing a third-party "app store", or developing their own software).
that isn't all that different from getting a Pixel.
Paradox is, that with Pixel device you can get most freedom and security togather. Installation of GrapheneOS is easiest custom ROM installation that could possibly be.
You can actually use most Apple devices without signing in. There are obviously a lot of benefits to the ecosystem but you can enjoy the hardware etc. without signing especially on Mac. For iPhone you'd need to learn to side load apps but it's doable.
You don't need an Apple account to back up an entire iPhone and restore it onto a new one, keeping almost all settings. They've kept the local iTunes method working from day 1. Idk how you do this in Android, sounds like most people sync everything to Google.
I've used Android phones for a long time. A couple of years ago I got an iPad to run an app only available on iOS. Getting that iPad running was more painful and frustrating than any of the dozen Android devices I've set up over the years.
To be fair, setting up a new iPhone (without restoring from backup) is a pretty long-winded process these days. You have to make about 50 decisions on various features, tap through numerous info screens, set up Face ID, Apple Pay, voice recognition, etc. etc. It feels like every team at Apple wants something in the onboarding flow.
actually you can skip most of these, but get reduced functionality in return. You can skip faceID/touchID, unlock code, appleID. You can’t skip terms, some customization options and, data collection and privacy settings.
In theory you can use iPhone and iPad without apple account - basically as dumb phone. But of course you won’t get AppStore access.
A lot of the complains expressed in this article are distinctly from the proprietary parts.
Stock Android, and especially stock Samsung, is far from being a free software solution.
A turnkey solution based (almost exclusively, and except the driver blobs) on free software would be to buy a phone running something like /e/. I think they also provide backups.
Of course, stuff requiring SafetyNet (or whatever Google current oppressive attestation system) may not work (though microG makes some of it work).
iOS/macOS is no better. My wife kept getting weird errors on her iPhone.
Turns out, her photos were only in the cloud and, quelle surprise, she had run out of room in "The Cloud(tm)" in spite of having almost half a terabyte free on her phone.
iOS now has a ton of dialogs and set up steps and the occasional dark pattern in selling you various cloud based subscriptions to Apples various services.
Having said all that, yes Android is pretty bad. I think it's the in the nature of platform owners to get their hooks into yoh as much as possible.
What is it in your life which makes it 'impossible' to use free software, Google-free AOSP-derived Android distributions being part of this? I run close to exclusively free software and have done so for decades and have yet to feel the need to change this. Of course there are exceptions, e.g. I need to run proprietary applications for banking and electronic ID but those are the exceptions to the rule. My server runs only free software, on desktop I sometimes run an older version of Sketchup to start modelling things but that's the only non-free package I use there. We have children, a cat, a dog, 4 horses, a farm, a large forest, the works. We have multi-device backup and restore as well. Things work fine, using free software, not using 'the cloud'. Where are the sticking points for you and what would it take to take those away?
For me, “impossible” isn’t the case. I’m deeply technical and could 100% run a setup like you’re describing. For me it’s, sadly, convenience and priorities. I oscillate between Linux and OS X for desktop/laptop use, have used Linux for server use for decades, have used both iOS/iPadOS and Android for tablets “in production”, and have only used Android as a secondary phone for doing development, and only iOS for primary phone use.
Convenience-wise, this is true both for the small daily stuff and large occasional stuff.
Day-to-day:
- For work I have to deal with .docx, .xlsx, .pots, and .pdf on a regular basis, both reading and authoring. Libreoffice mucks up formatting in both directions for Word documents. Web Office365 sucks in comparison to desktop O365. Linux PDF viewers are fine until you have to fill out a form and digitally sign one.
- Mechanical CAD: my team uses Fusion 360. There’s Windows and Mac versions. I haven’t tried it under Wine. I suspect it’d be painful. I’ve tried some OSS solutions. Not pleasant.
- ECAD: KiCAD has grown up and has become my primary ECAD tool. Hooray!
- Time Machine: for my Linux machines I have a great setup that pushes backups to Backblaze B2 using restic. For my current laptop, I plug an external drive in every morning and Time Machine does its magic. I also run the B2 script for off-site occasionally.
- Phone calls: OS X and iOS have fantastic hand-off. I do most of my work communication through Teams and Slack, both of which work fine on Linux. Phone calls, though... if my phone starts ringing, I get a notification on my laptop and can just click "Answer" to take the phone call through the headphones I'm already wearing.
- Clipboard integration: I actually started writing this comment on my phone and then decided to move over to my laptop. Copying it on my phone automatically put it in my clipboard to paste on my laptop.
Hardware compatibility:
- My last Linux desktop was fabulous. Happily drove a 4K display, I loved living in XFCE every day. There was one issue that was extraordinarily frustrating: if the machine sat unused for somewhere around 24-72 hours it would enter a very strange power state. The machine was still powered up to some degree, but was completely unresponsive. I could use it every day with no issue, for weeks. If I didn't use it for that 24-72h timeframe, boom, it would get into this state. This only ever happened to me while I was travelling. I did several deep debug dives into this to no avail, including at one point setting up the kernel logger to log over serial to another embedded machine. I pointed a security camera at it to see if, say, a cat or some other obvious physical thing was causing it. I ended up hooking up an Ethernet-controlled power bar so that I could power cycle it and access the data that was on it. Tried multiple kernels, many different kernel command-line options, never did get to the bottom of it.
- My older 2014 Mac Mini that sat next to it was bulletproof. I could do 98% of what I was doing with the Linux desktop machine remotely on that machine just fine. Mostly there were some embedded Linux tasks that wouldn't work well on the Mac.
OS Updates:
- My current phone (iPhone 12 Pro) is 6 years old. It's running the latest OS. You can have an experience like this with stock Android distributions if you very carefully research which vendors and specific devices use... I forget what it's called... Google One? My dev phone is a Nokia and it got updates for a long time. I don't remember when/if they stopped.
- The idea of having to custom compile or hunt down OS updates from a third party destroys the convenience of this for me. I want to spend essentially 0% of my life thinking about what to do for an OS for my phone or tablet.
- My old 10-year-old Macbook Pro finally stopped receiving updates a year or two ago. It runs Linux now quite happily. It's a fantastic Linux machine.
Occasional new device setup:
- Back to the article, the Apple "I have a new phone/iPad/laptop" story is just unbeatable. I couldn't even tell you what the steps involve because they involve virtually no thinking at all. It's roughly "hold your new device near your old device". You maybe have to log into it first. It requires no thought at all.
You're presenting a false dichotomy. I'd argue that installing and setting up GrapheneOS on a Pixel is as-much or less effort compared to setting up an iPhone. And it gives you full freedom and the best possible security while doing so. You can have everything at once.
95% of what was written in this article isn't required to set up an Android phone. You can literally log into your Google account on first boot and everything is done for you, automatically.
Maybe Samsung has changed how the first boot works compared to stock Android, but this definitely has not been my experience across several Samsung devices. Also many apps store their data in different ways which doesn't always survive a device migration/backup. Only cloud-only apps have a good experience, wheras anything that stores data on device can be hit and miss depending on how easy individual apps manage its backup.
At least Samsung doesn't sync folders.
Meaning: if they were organized before by topic they aren't there after syncing via their "Samsung Smart Switch Mobile" to a new Samsung phone.
A lot gets synced, but it's not like an image with full DSC (desired state configuration) afterwards.
Pretty mediocre -- not totally useless, but far from a seamless experience.
I find it hard to believe that almost 20 years after copying iPhone, Google still hasn’t figured out how to do backups properly for simple phone migration. What happens if your Android phone is stolen or destroyed?
(It reminds me of the major car manufacturers ignoring what Tesla saw as vital - having a reliable trustworthy easy to use charging network was as important as the BEV itself.)
Apple products are atrocious to setup too. I've wanted to film just how bad the experience is but I'd need a 3rd phone since I have to use the 2nd phone to setup the new 1st phone.
a big chunk of apples valuation is that they can just tell you to bend over the day they decide to aquire half a trillion dollars, fire half there workers, and demonstrate the creative way there user agreaments are bieng interpereted, and that you can get a trump phone if you dont like it.
this is the company that has signed an exclusive deal to provide phones for the ZGF, zionist genocide force, so dont even bother, ok?
*Samsung phones. Known for a long time for their crapware infested devices. At the other end of the spectrum, Pixel phones are quite easy and smooth to set up.
Regarding users creating new accounts on phone setup:
Recently I encountered a user that had created a new Google account when switching to a new device... on their last 5 devices.
So when they switched to the latest one and called me to set up the phone, I had to wrangle the contacts, photos, cloud storage and whatnot from all of those accounts.
Another pain point for me (in the EU/Balkans) is the transfer of Whatsapp and Viber. For reasons unknown, the accounts, contacts, chats, downloaded data can't be transferred during device setup. The only way to transfer data to a new device is to create a cloud backup on the old phone, which requires creating a wapp/viber account and setting up the google drive backup (local backup to a file? lol no. Any other cloud service available? lol no). Of course, when dealing with a media-heavy user (lots of photos, lots of memes/videos from group chats that are automatically downloaded to the phone), often is the case that the cloud storage tied to the google account doesn't have enough space for the backups, because it is filled with the automatic google photos backup that nobody turns off. And the user usually doesn't want to pay for extra space on Google because they don't understand why or just plainly don't want to.
So yeah, the transfer process is slow and complicated and full of traps, but it also offers an insight in to how much the imaginary "average consumer" doesn't care about this stuff and just agrees to everything offered.
While this will backup all the media files, the chats themselves are encrypted and the key to decrypt them is not included with that backup. The key is in the data partition which you will not be able to access without rooting your phone.
You don't have to use the cloud transfer with WhatsApp. You can simply transfer the backup files manually before you do the first logon. They're in the media folder.
> You don't have to use the cloud transfer with WhatsApp. You can simply transfer the backup files manually before you do the first logon. They're in the media folder.
This does not work anymore. The chats are encrypted and the key to decrypt them is not in the backup files.
I am an iPhone user myself, but the number of "this is an android problem" and "just use iPhone" in response to the author's complaints surprises me. I thought HN was more anti apple in the past? Maybe we are all old now and tinkering with our devices is out of fashion, but this doesn't make the author's complaints illegitimate.
And if we zoom out a bit, iPhones are only 20% of the global phone market. The overwhelming majority of the world uses android because, well, iPhones are expensive. There are plenty of places where an iPhone is still a status symbol. Even you think the author should have bought his parents iPhones instead, there is still a whole world of people out there who would benefit from improvements in the android ecosystem.
I don't use Android because iPhones are more expensive. In fact you can get Android phones that are as expensive and sometimes more expensive than iPhones. I use Android phones because it is a much more flexible ecosystem, where I can choose my browser, for example.
I don't mean to dismiss your opinion but I doubt this is the reason android has such a huge market share. I doubt the average person even knows that apple forces every app to use apple's own browser. The countries where android dominate are also the ones where you can get phone plans with free data for WhatsApp and Facebook. There is an entire world outside our techie circles where price and UX trumps having principles about user control and freedom.
I’m very much the inverse of you. I don’t use Android because I don’t want to have to worry about all the fiddly stuff that is involved with Android. I like that it’s not a big deal to migrate to a new phone, that I don’t have to worry about whether I’ll be able to get security updates in a year, or have to spend time disabling telemetry.
If I did want to do a lot of fiddling with the phone then sure, Android would be a better choice, but like I had said back in 2004, what I wanted more than anything else was a phone that would sync its contacts with my Mac.
Exactly what I was going to say. I don't use iPhone because, well, it's iPhone. And until, like, this year, it was strictly more prohibitive than Android. Also, it was honestly just worse of a device than some Android flagships, and the tradeoff is only worth it if you are a lazy USA-ian, who doesn't use any "sketchier" non-mainstream apps, has an Apple account and owns a bunch of Apple devices anyway. Oh, and all your friends use iPhone Messages app. Then iPhone is the default. But outside of USA it was always more of a gimmick than a natural choice.
That being said, even if you wouldn't have said it before me, I probably shouldn't have said it too anyway, because I suspect that globally speaking the GP is right. Most people don't buy flagships, yet everybody has a phone. And Apple doesn't even try to compete in "non-premium" market, it's strictly impossible to buy a new iPhone for the price of some Redmi or whatever, which isn't even noticeably worse than an iPhone, practically speaking.
HN is mostly US and apparently in US even geeks have given up on Android.
Anyway, here is my experience when I upgraded from a Pixel 8 to Pixel 10 Pro: login to my Google account, let the backup restore happen then my new phone was identical to the old one.
I only had to do the login process to a few messaging apps like Signal or WhatsApp, and my home settings on Smart Launcher had to be manually imported but that's pretty much it.
Basically, a lot of what OP lists as "bare minimum requirements" are just preferences. If he used his Android phone like an iPhone, and like most people use it (with minimal tinkering) then the migration would have been just as smooth.
Yeah, and it's been like that for years - the past decade, at least.
I've had a couple of Nexuses, a few of the Pixels, with a Nokia in the mix too. Never any problem - just log in, wait a few mins for the apps to automatically install and the data to backup/restore (which, iirc, happens over local wifi rather than going through the cloud). The last upgrade included a separate work profile managed by MS Intune, and that was also smoothly handled by the upgrade process.
Yes, Whatsapp chat history has to be handled separately (as others have mentioned) because of the e2e encryption. The only other thing that needs doing is confirming that I want Firefox as my default browser when I first run it. Otherwise, it's all completely hands-off.
iPhones are only 20% but in USA they are much popular, and most people here will be from USA and will have disposable income working as software developers.
The worst part is that it keeps getting harder, not easier. Every new phone setup asks you to connect more accounts, enable more permissions, and configure more services.
I recently helped a family member set up a new phone and it took over 2 hours. Between 2FA migrations, app re-authentication, and trying to figure out which backup actually had their data, it was miserable.
Phone manufacturers have zero incentive to make cross-platform migration easy. Apple wants you to stay on iPhone. Google wants you to stay on Android. The user suffers.
Giving an Android phone to elderly/non-technical people is asking for trouble imho. They will eventually tap their way into installing suspicious apps, adware or even straight up malware. It's inevitable, they are not aware of what they do and how to avoid the many risks of the digital world.
I remember having the same struggles of OP when setting up a cheap android phone for my grandma, the amount of bloat, adware and misleading content I had to remove was incredible (and some couldn't even be removed). The irony was that after a few months of light usage, the phone was in a state even worse, full of downloaded apps and opened suspicious websites in the browser. She would swear she never even noticed any of those.
This is one of the cases in which giving them an iPhone with its walled garden has great benefits. You can also setup parental control on top of that already locked down ecosystem.
> Plain Google search is still the main vector of scams
How incredibly sad this fact is. And even sadder all the second-level implications about how it got to this point. And then sadder still that there is unlikely anything done about it in the foreseeable future.
My mother can no longer do the stuff she used to on her iOS phone because it is so complicated compared to the iPhone 4 I gave her a long time ago.
I screen her emails with her consent, very easy to do with Fastmail that imports her Yahoo mail into a folder she doesn't see and then I move okay emails to her inbox.
If your relatives are significantly tech illiterate, I'd skip the smartphone entirely and go for a locked-down Linux desktop + feature phone. The most dangerous apps are big legitimate ones.
If you do go for a smartphone, my experience tells me that there's no difference between Android and iOS. The biggest sources for shady apps are the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. Shady stuff on the web can be easily defeated using an adblocking browser, which is essential for older relatives.
> If your relatives are significantly tech illiterate, I'd skip the smartphone entirely and go for a locked-down Linux desktop + feature phone. The most dangerous apps are big legitimate ones.
You know, they are adults and have free will and do want a smartphone like everyone else to use Whatsapp, read the news, search things on Google, etc.
Hell, my 95 year old grandma convinced a nurse to install TikTok on her phone because she saw her using it and also wanted to try it. It's not like we can isolate them from the world
FYI: you can also set up parental controls on Android.
Parental control is a also a hot buggy mess on iOS currently. Our daughter has an iPhone with parental control set up and a bunch of apps that are whitelisted regularly refuse to start at random moments (blocked by parental controls). We hoped that iOS 26 would finally fix it, but nope.
It doesn't really matter, both phone ecosystems are a mess, but in different ways.
It's always crazy to me to see this kind of smug takes defending huge corporations as if they're your friends.
It's not all good or bad, there's a security issue with side loading, as well as shovelware on the play store. However, there is no world where I would argue that these justify limiting consumer grade hardware to walled gardens.
Funny, as someone that uses Android, sideloads apps, and is the "tech guy" for some older people, I went "yep, Google's own Play Store is full of shitty apps".
I recommend getting an Android phone (there are cheap Google Pixels out there) and try to sideload an app. Also browse the web a bit without an adblocker. I'd be surprised if by the end of the experiment you thought that sideloading is the reason their grandma's phone is full of crap.
Upgraded to one of the latest iPhone recently. First time I clicked on “transfer data from old phone”. I’m used to reinstalling the operating system every couple of months from when I used Windows. It took maybe 15 minutes with close to 0 interactions. Everything was transferred. I was already authenticated in apps. What took manual steps was eSIM transfers.
I don’t remember exact steps so there could have been a bit more. But it was an impressive experience and I told my geek friends about it. They were surprised this is the first time I used this feature.
Google has APIs to do the same. In fact, it works on most apps. The biggest exceptions are security sensitive apps (2FA, password managers) and WhatsApp for some stupid reason. If you're a HN Android user who turns off any form of data sharing like me, you wouldn't notice, though, as this requires the "back up my data" checkbox during setup of the old and new phone to work conpletely.
Another issue on Android is that iOS allows for syncing data through the user's iCloud, which can be gigabytes in size, but Google has you use the Google Drive API which sucks and involves handing over credit card info.
The Android file transfer has another trick that Apple doesn't seem to do, which is fully offline local sync rather than going through the cloud. This has reliability issues and requires both devices to stay on and nearby while the transfer is in progress, but on slower internet connections the process can be a heck of a lot faster thanks to modern wifi speeds.
For some reason, iMessage always ends up in a very weird state when I transfer to a new iPhone. Also, some apps don't get restored settings, but I think they opt out (usually banking, credit card, insurance apps, etc.).
i typically don't want to re-enter credentials etc, so I always do encrypted backup via itunes.. took 6-7hrs just transferring photos quite hands off most of the time but still painful, can't imagine what android guys go through
Transferring eSIM from one iPhone to another can be restricted by the carrier. Here in India, the second largest carrier (Airtel), does not support the native iOS eSIM transfer process. It’s a separate set of steps (the ones published on Airtel’s website won’t work, despite customer care claiming that it does). What works is almost like applying for a new or replacement eSIM.
What I hate the most about setting up new devices up is apple MDM on our company-managed devices combined with data transfer via iTunes backup. Here’s why:
1. The devices will offer to transfer data wirelessly, but won’t tell you that some data isn’t transferred. Instead using iTunes is a must as (in our case) more data is copied. This excludes data from managed apps - understandable.
2. When updating and recovering the backup on the new device is done, the regular setup experience starts. But, as your WiFi is also copied over, the device starts trying to update and install apps in the background, even before you logged into your Apple ID. So you’re constantly annoyed by popups asking for the ID. If you try to enter it, another pop up will interrupt amd stop you from entering the credentials. It even aborts touch/face ID setup and makes you start over again. I’ve had some colleagues starting over on Touch ID for like 5 times before they were faster than the popups. That mixes with popups for company accounts like mail credentials. And even a required change of the unlock password. Sometimes up to 10 different popups spawn in a few seconds…
Seriously, why? Is it that hard to stop these prompts till the setup is done and then prompt the user for everything needed once?
Readit News
I've been running Android custom ROMs since Gingerbread days, on HTC HD2. At that time, I'd be flashing nightlies, switching between CyanogenMod and Paranoid Android, kernels, getting bootloops.
Setting up the phone was no big deal - most apps could be backed up with Titanium Backup, few that couldn't (e.g. banking) would just get redownloaded and I'd log in immediately. I was also still a student back then and had more time to tinker, but if it was anything like it is now, I would've given up much quicker.
In the last year I had to do few clean flashes with changing my phone, then updating LineageOS, and once the phone just wiped itself for no reason. Backups don't work for most apps - even if you can get one, they'll crash without a specific reason. 2FA everywhere is mostly security theater, with apps that have no business keeping my data but insisting on it, using SMS, email, authenticators, selfies. Banking apps needing two layers of root detection circumvention (because a custom ROM is already problematic, so you need root to stop them from detecting an unlocked bootloader, and then again not to detect root). Google insisting on sending a security check notification to a phone that's just been wiped with no ability to confirm that it's really you from your PC (but if you give it few minutes, it will give in and let you verify with SMS), always feels like hacking yourself.
It's a massive pain already on a clean, bloatware-free custom ROM, with a truly minimum app list. Once you need to start debloating the official OS, it's another hour or three, depending if they're nice and let you uninstall things or if you need adb access to disable offending packages.
It was the first app I ever spent money on, and I did so without any hesitation at all.
It was just genuinely useful to be able to back up and restore my own data on my own devices, and to do so on my own accord. It was a process that I owned, and controlled, and if it went wrong somehow then I was able to troubleshoot it and make sensible decisions.
I haven't had a rooted phone in a decade or so now. These days, backups allegedly happen -- somehow -- and the entire process seems to be both deliberately and inscrutably shrouded in mystery.
When I switch devices or reset to factory to try to fix an eSIM issue (or whatever I do that makes restoration a useful path today), then it's never clear before I start whether the backup/restore will magically work or if it will simply fail without recourse. The uncertainty demonstrates a reprehensibly terrible way to deal with backups.
I love Free software too, and I wish I could run more of my life on it, but it’s no longer my hobby. I like cars, too, but I don’t work on a hobby car. The author’s experience is why I use proprietary stuff like Apple for these parts of my life. A new Apple device is usually a non-event: charge it, authenticate, wait for the back to restore while you go about your business.
The cost of more freedom (in this case, from proprietary toolchains and data lakes) is needing to exercise more control (compiling custom Android images). I just, honest to god, don’t want to spend the time on it. A kid, a house, cats, getting old. I like that someone else has solved multi-device backup and restore, and I feel happy watching it happen so perfectly, even if I’m not the one controlling it.
Most of the author's criticisms were centered on avoiding account creation and third-party apps. I'm not sure I would give Apple the benefit of the doubt here since the motivations are different: Apple is far more interested in locking customers into their own ecosystem. On the Android front, that isn't all that different from getting a Pixel. Of course, getting an Android based Samsung adds an extra company who wants to do the same as well as selling space to third parties.
While Android being more open does add complexity, it is mostly limited to those who buy devices produced by another vendor or those who choose to exercise their freedom (e.g. by choosing to install a third-party version of Android, or installing a third-party "app store", or developing their own software).
Paradox is, that with Pixel device you can get most freedom and security togather. Installation of GrapheneOS is easiest custom ROM installation that could possibly be.
In theory you can use iPhone and iPad without apple account - basically as dumb phone. But of course you won’t get AppStore access.
Stock Android, and especially stock Samsung, is far from being a free software solution.
A turnkey solution based (almost exclusively, and except the driver blobs) on free software would be to buy a phone running something like /e/. I think they also provide backups.
Of course, stuff requiring SafetyNet (or whatever Google current oppressive attestation system) may not work (though microG makes some of it work).
Sort of. They use SeedVault, but a bunch of apps are not backed up. When restoring another set of apps do not properly restore
iOS/macOS is no better. My wife kept getting weird errors on her iPhone.
Turns out, her photos were only in the cloud and, quelle surprise, she had run out of room in "The Cloud(tm)" in spite of having almost half a terabyte free on her phone.
All the companies want to hold your data hostage.
storing things in the cloud is responsible
Having said all that, yes Android is pretty bad. I think it's the in the nature of platform owners to get their hooks into yoh as much as possible.
When I set up Linux Mint, there was none of this.
Play Integrity and Google's monopoly on providing "hardware attestation".
Convenience-wise, this is true both for the small daily stuff and large occasional stuff.
Day-to-day:
- For work I have to deal with .docx, .xlsx, .pots, and .pdf on a regular basis, both reading and authoring. Libreoffice mucks up formatting in both directions for Word documents. Web Office365 sucks in comparison to desktop O365. Linux PDF viewers are fine until you have to fill out a form and digitally sign one.
- Mechanical CAD: my team uses Fusion 360. There’s Windows and Mac versions. I haven’t tried it under Wine. I suspect it’d be painful. I’ve tried some OSS solutions. Not pleasant.
- ECAD: KiCAD has grown up and has become my primary ECAD tool. Hooray!
- Time Machine: for my Linux machines I have a great setup that pushes backups to Backblaze B2 using restic. For my current laptop, I plug an external drive in every morning and Time Machine does its magic. I also run the B2 script for off-site occasionally.
- Phone calls: OS X and iOS have fantastic hand-off. I do most of my work communication through Teams and Slack, both of which work fine on Linux. Phone calls, though... if my phone starts ringing, I get a notification on my laptop and can just click "Answer" to take the phone call through the headphones I'm already wearing.
- Clipboard integration: I actually started writing this comment on my phone and then decided to move over to my laptop. Copying it on my phone automatically put it in my clipboard to paste on my laptop.
Hardware compatibility:
- My last Linux desktop was fabulous. Happily drove a 4K display, I loved living in XFCE every day. There was one issue that was extraordinarily frustrating: if the machine sat unused for somewhere around 24-72 hours it would enter a very strange power state. The machine was still powered up to some degree, but was completely unresponsive. I could use it every day with no issue, for weeks. If I didn't use it for that 24-72h timeframe, boom, it would get into this state. This only ever happened to me while I was travelling. I did several deep debug dives into this to no avail, including at one point setting up the kernel logger to log over serial to another embedded machine. I pointed a security camera at it to see if, say, a cat or some other obvious physical thing was causing it. I ended up hooking up an Ethernet-controlled power bar so that I could power cycle it and access the data that was on it. Tried multiple kernels, many different kernel command-line options, never did get to the bottom of it.
- My older 2014 Mac Mini that sat next to it was bulletproof. I could do 98% of what I was doing with the Linux desktop machine remotely on that machine just fine. Mostly there were some embedded Linux tasks that wouldn't work well on the Mac.
OS Updates:
- My current phone (iPhone 12 Pro) is 6 years old. It's running the latest OS. You can have an experience like this with stock Android distributions if you very carefully research which vendors and specific devices use... I forget what it's called... Google One? My dev phone is a Nokia and it got updates for a long time. I don't remember when/if they stopped.
- The idea of having to custom compile or hunt down OS updates from a third party destroys the convenience of this for me. I want to spend essentially 0% of my life thinking about what to do for an OS for my phone or tablet.
- My old 10-year-old Macbook Pro finally stopped receiving updates a year or two ago. It runs Linux now quite happily. It's a fantastic Linux machine.
Occasional new device setup:
- Back to the article, the Apple "I have a new phone/iPad/laptop" story is just unbeatable. I couldn't even tell you what the steps involve because they involve virtually no thinking at all. It's roughly "hold your new device near your old device". You maybe have to log into it first. It requires no thought at all.
So you don’t have to do this, but if you don’t, you are under even more surveillance and experience more advertising.
Pretty mediocre -- not totally useless, but far from a seamless experience.
(It reminds me of the major car manufacturers ignoring what Tesla saw as vital - having a reliable trustworthy easy to use charging network was as important as the BEV itself.)
I set up a new one for my son on Christmas Eve and I almost gave up completely.
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Recently I encountered a user that had created a new Google account when switching to a new device... on their last 5 devices.
So when they switched to the latest one and called me to set up the phone, I had to wrangle the contacts, photos, cloud storage and whatnot from all of those accounts.
Another pain point for me (in the EU/Balkans) is the transfer of Whatsapp and Viber. For reasons unknown, the accounts, contacts, chats, downloaded data can't be transferred during device setup. The only way to transfer data to a new device is to create a cloud backup on the old phone, which requires creating a wapp/viber account and setting up the google drive backup (local backup to a file? lol no. Any other cloud service available? lol no). Of course, when dealing with a media-heavy user (lots of photos, lots of memes/videos from group chats that are automatically downloaded to the phone), often is the case that the cloud storage tied to the google account doesn't have enough space for the backups, because it is filled with the automatic google photos backup that nobody turns off. And the user usually doesn't want to pay for extra space on Google because they don't understand why or just plainly don't want to.
So yeah, the transfer process is slow and complicated and full of traps, but it also offers an insight in to how much the imaginary "average consumer" doesn't care about this stuff and just agrees to everything offered.
I have that set up, and Nextcloud syncs the folder to my server
Due to this, I've resorted to backing up to drive without any media and then after restore, sync the media back via other means.
It's also worth mentioning that when you sync with drive, it doesn't preserve the time stamps of devices
for Viber I've only tried it via the backup on old phone and then restore that backup on the new phone
With Viber I don't know, I've never used that.
This does not work anymore. The chats are encrypted and the key to decrypt them is not in the backup files.
Telegram, due to not being e2e encrypted, is trivial to transfer, a new login does it.
It makes things a lot easier yes but you do give up a lot of privacy too.
And if we zoom out a bit, iPhones are only 20% of the global phone market. The overwhelming majority of the world uses android because, well, iPhones are expensive. There are plenty of places where an iPhone is still a status symbol. Even you think the author should have bought his parents iPhones instead, there is still a whole world of people out there who would benefit from improvements in the android ecosystem.
If I did want to do a lot of fiddling with the phone then sure, Android would be a better choice, but like I had said back in 2004, what I wanted more than anything else was a phone that would sync its contacts with my Mac.
That being said, even if you wouldn't have said it before me, I probably shouldn't have said it too anyway, because I suspect that globally speaking the GP is right. Most people don't buy flagships, yet everybody has a phone. And Apple doesn't even try to compete in "non-premium" market, it's strictly impossible to buy a new iPhone for the price of some Redmi or whatever, which isn't even noticeably worse than an iPhone, practically speaking.
Anyway, here is my experience when I upgraded from a Pixel 8 to Pixel 10 Pro: login to my Google account, let the backup restore happen then my new phone was identical to the old one.
I only had to do the login process to a few messaging apps like Signal or WhatsApp, and my home settings on Smart Launcher had to be manually imported but that's pretty much it.
Basically, a lot of what OP lists as "bare minimum requirements" are just preferences. If he used his Android phone like an iPhone, and like most people use it (with minimal tinkering) then the migration would have been just as smooth.
I've had a couple of Nexuses, a few of the Pixels, with a Nokia in the mix too. Never any problem - just log in, wait a few mins for the apps to automatically install and the data to backup/restore (which, iirc, happens over local wifi rather than going through the cloud). The last upgrade included a separate work profile managed by MS Intune, and that was also smoothly handled by the upgrade process.
Yes, Whatsapp chat history has to be handled separately (as others have mentioned) because of the e2e encryption. The only other thing that needs doing is confirming that I want Firefox as my default browser when I first run it. Otherwise, it's all completely hands-off.
I recently helped a family member set up a new phone and it took over 2 hours. Between 2FA migrations, app re-authentication, and trying to figure out which backup actually had their data, it was miserable.
Phone manufacturers have zero incentive to make cross-platform migration easy. Apple wants you to stay on iPhone. Google wants you to stay on Android. The user suffers.
I give a silent thanks every day that my dad still has a flip phone and no desire to upgrade.
This is one of the cases in which giving them an iPhone with its walled garden has great benefits. You can also setup parental control on top of that already locked down ecosystem.
Some things are actually worse on the iOS side. It took years for Apple to catch up with spam and scam calls/SMS detection.
Plain Google search is still the main vector of scams, I eventually set up NextDNS on her devices.
How incredibly sad this fact is. And even sadder all the second-level implications about how it got to this point. And then sadder still that there is unlikely anything done about it in the foreseeable future.
I screen her emails with her consent, very easy to do with Fastmail that imports her Yahoo mail into a folder she doesn't see and then I move okay emails to her inbox.
If you do go for a smartphone, my experience tells me that there's no difference between Android and iOS. The biggest sources for shady apps are the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. Shady stuff on the web can be easily defeated using an adblocking browser, which is essential for older relatives.
You know, they are adults and have free will and do want a smartphone like everyone else to use Whatsapp, read the news, search things on Google, etc.
Hell, my 95 year old grandma convinced a nurse to install TikTok on her phone because she saw her using it and also wanted to try it. It's not like we can isolate them from the world
Parental control is a also a hot buggy mess on iOS currently. Our daughter has an iPhone with parental control set up and a bunch of apps that are whitelisted regularly refuse to start at random moments (blocked by parental controls). We hoped that iOS 26 would finally fix it, but nope.
It doesn't really matter, both phone ecosystems are a mess, but in different ways.
It's not all good or bad, there's a security issue with side loading, as well as shovelware on the play store. However, there is no world where I would argue that these justify limiting consumer grade hardware to walled gardens.
I recommend getting an Android phone (there are cheap Google Pixels out there) and try to sideload an app. Also browse the web a bit without an adblocker. I'd be surprised if by the end of the experiment you thought that sideloading is the reason their grandma's phone is full of crap.
I don’t remember exact steps so there could have been a bit more. But it was an impressive experience and I told my geek friends about it. They were surprised this is the first time I used this feature.
Another issue on Android is that iOS allows for syncing data through the user's iCloud, which can be gigabytes in size, but Google has you use the Google Drive API which sucks and involves handing over credit card info.
The Android file transfer has another trick that Apple doesn't seem to do, which is fully offline local sync rather than going through the cloud. This has reliability issues and requires both devices to stay on and nearby while the transfer is in progress, but on slower internet connections the process can be a heck of a lot faster thanks to modern wifi speeds.
Transferring eSIM from one iPhone to another can be restricted by the carrier. Here in India, the second largest carrier (Airtel), does not support the native iOS eSIM transfer process. It’s a separate set of steps (the ones published on Airtel’s website won’t work, despite customer care claiming that it does). What works is almost like applying for a new or replacement eSIM.
1. The devices will offer to transfer data wirelessly, but won’t tell you that some data isn’t transferred. Instead using iTunes is a must as (in our case) more data is copied. This excludes data from managed apps - understandable.
2. When updating and recovering the backup on the new device is done, the regular setup experience starts. But, as your WiFi is also copied over, the device starts trying to update and install apps in the background, even before you logged into your Apple ID. So you’re constantly annoyed by popups asking for the ID. If you try to enter it, another pop up will interrupt amd stop you from entering the credentials. It even aborts touch/face ID setup and makes you start over again. I’ve had some colleagues starting over on Touch ID for like 5 times before they were faster than the popups. That mixes with popups for company accounts like mail credentials. And even a required change of the unlock password. Sometimes up to 10 different popups spawn in a few seconds…
Seriously, why? Is it that hard to stop these prompts till the setup is done and then prompt the user for everything needed once?