One of the biggest reasons I stopped rooting my phone was that for every ROM, every attempt at something new, I’d be in the position of having to spend hours logging back into apps and would lose my progress quite often on games. I don’t generally do phone reviews either because the same issues persist – if I want to work on a phone that’s a two hour commitment to transfer my life over to it and if you don’t transfer your digital life over to a phone are you really even testing it?
Android has been good for the past couple of versions letting you get your apps back and restoring some of the accounts, but for me it’s still a fairly extensive transition time as I log back into far too many home control apps, air monitoring, bank, credit card, restore my accounts on a couple of games I play, go through multi-factor authentication on half of those just to prove I have access to the email account still, etc.
It does appear that developers will have to opt in or out of a restore key, so doesn’t look like we’ll be seeing complete coverage for a few months after Google finally wheels this decades-needed update to both new device transfers and system backups.
I very much hope for the day I can get a phone in to review, scan a QR code and have that new phone be my phone for all intents and purposes without having to go app by app and log back in. ESIMs made this close to a reality, now we’ve just got a bit more to go.
Side note, I’ve been noticing that plenty of apps I had on my Pixel 8 Pro did not transfer to my Pixel 9 Pro XL. For how long the transfer took it is bizarre that it was not complete. These were apps from the Play Store and no sideloading involved.
I suspect even when this rolls out we’ll find it still doesn’t quite do everything, in the name of security, as I feel I’ve written this article before.
