Moving Everything From Your Old Phone to Your New One
Mrs. Gerlach came to the library a few months ago, in tears, with two phones and a story. Her son had bought her a new iPhone for her eightieth birthday. She'd plugged it in, gone through the setup, and chosen "Don't transfer apps and data" because she thought it sounded sensible — she wanted to start fresh. By the time she sat down across from me, her old phone was in the kitchen drawer at home, the new one had no contacts, and the only photograph she had of her late husband on the boat at Grand Lake was, as far as she knew, gone.
It wasn't gone. It was sitting in iCloud, where the old phone had been backing up faithfully for six years. We got every photo back within twenty minutes. But she'd had a bad week thinking they weren't.
This is the article I wish I'd given her in advance. Most of what people lose during a phone switch is recoverable. Some isn't. Knowing which is which is the difference between a calm afternoon and a panicked one.
Before you touch anything: charge the old phone
Plug the old phone in. Leave it on the charger overnight. Connect it to your home Wi-Fi if it isn't already. The next morning, before you open the box on the new one, open the old phone's Settings and look at your iCloud or Google backup date. If the date there is more than a week old, run a fresh backup before you do anything else. It takes twenty minutes on most phones and it's the cheapest insurance there is.
I have seen people skip this step roughly two hundred times. They are almost always fine. The ones who aren't fine, however, are very much not fine. Don't take the gamble.
The transfer itself takes about half an hour
The actual move, once you're ready, is the easy part. Apple and Google have spent a decade making this simpler than it used to be. For an iPhone-to-iPhone move, the new phone notices the old one is nearby during setup and offers "Quick Start." You point the old phone's camera at a pattern on the new phone's screen — it looks like a little fingerprint — and the two devices do the work themselves. Twenty-five minutes later you've got everything.
Android-to-Android works similarly through a USB-C cable between the two phones, or sometimes wirelessly depending on the manufacturer. Samsung's version is called Smart Switch; Google's is called Switch to Android. Both work fine.
Crossing the iPhone-to-Android boundary (or the other direction) takes a free app you install on the side you're leaving from. Apple's "Move to iOS" app on the Play Store will pull from Android to iPhone. Google's "Switch to Android" app on the App Store does the reverse. They handle contacts, photos, calendar, and most messages. They don't always handle WhatsApp message history; if you have years of WhatsApp messages you want to keep, look up WhatsApp's separate transfer tool before you start the bigger move.
What might still go wrong
Three things, almost always:
Two-factor authentication. Lots of your accounts — bank, email, patient portal — will text you a six-digit code the first time you sign in on the new phone. If your number has stayed the same, great. If you've also switched carriers or activated a new SIM, the code may go to a number that isn't yet working. Do the phone-data transfer before you change carriers if you can possibly avoid doing both on the same afternoon.
App passwords. The transfer brings your apps over, but for security reasons most of them ask you to sign in again the first time you open them. Have your home password notebook in front of you. The bank app, the patient portal, and the airline app are the three that most often catch people short.
Carrier-specific apps. A few apps tied to your phone number (Verizon's voicemail-transcription, AT&T's specific apps, certain Wi-Fi calling features) need a separate setup on the new phone. These are usually obvious because the apps simply won't open or will say "set up again." Their support lines are pretty good at walking you through it.
Don't put the old phone in a drawer for a month
Keep it powered on and within reach for at least two weeks after the switch. You will discover, around day eight, that there's some small thing — a saved password, a photo, a note — that didn't make the trip. With the old phone alive on a charger in the corner of your kitchen, you can recover it in a minute. With the old phone wiped and traded in, it's a much longer afternoon.
After two weeks have passed and nothing else has surfaced, then you can wipe the old phone and either trade it in (carriers and Best Buy give surprisingly fair credit these days) or hand it to a grandchild who needs an emergency phone. A wiped, fully-charged spare iPhone or Android in a kitchen drawer is a wonderful thing to have when you accidentally drop the new one in the lake.
One thing the apps can't move for you
Print one photograph of everyone you love before you switch phones for the very first time. Hang it on the refrigerator. There's no good reason for this except that smartphone history has not been long enough yet for anyone to know how this all ends, and a printed photograph on a fridge in a kitchen will outlast every transfer tool ever made.
That's what I wish I'd told Mrs. Gerlach a week before her birthday. I told her at the library instead. She forgave me, because she's a kind woman, and now her grandson has set up Shared Albums on her behalf and she gets pictures of the great-grandchildren every Sunday morning. The phone, in the end, is just the carrier. The pictures of the people you love are the cargo.
Written by Margaret Holloway. Last verified 18 June 2026.