Dear Apple, moving to a new iPhone from an old one is a mess: you should fix that

Thanks to the “Move to iOS” app, upgrading from an Android phone to a new iPhone is surprisingly easy. Alas, there’s no such app to make the move between two iOS devices. Why is Apple making its customers’ life harder when they’ve just proven their loyalty?

Over Christmas, I’ve been in charge of the setup of two new phones. I was moving from my old iPhone 6s to a new iPhone 7 Plus, while my mom upgraded from an Android phone (a two years old Honor 6) to her first iPhone — an iPhone 6.
Guess which move was easier? Well, think again: it wasn’t mine.

I’m not a fan of iCloud backups: I don’t have enough space in my account and I don’t like Apple’s pricing structure; it’s painfully slow, even on fast connections; I still don’t feel comfortable delegating my backups to a remote server. Plus, I was at my parent’s place in Italy, stuck with a 5Mbps Alice ADSL connection. Even if I wanted, the iCloud backup and the subsequent restore on the new phone were not a viable option.

That’s why I proceeded with the only option left: restoring the phone from an iTunes backup. First of all, I had to free up space on my MacBook Pro. Apparently, 256GB of storage on a computer are just enough to get by, but rest assured that they will let you down, sooner or later. But that’s another story, and that’s my bad. I needed a new portable hard drive anyway, so I just went, bought one and moved some data, freeing up space on the computer.
When the backup was done, I was able to restore it on the new iPhone right away. The process was relatively quick, but then something weird happened.

App thinning, that’s what happened, and it’s a mess.

App thinning is actually a very good idea. It’s an optimization process that since iOS 9 lets developers slice up their apps to save space on the user’s devices. Additional components can be downloaded selectively, based on the specific configuration of the phone or tablet. It saves space on the user’s computer or iCloud account when baking up the device, too. One implication of this solution, though, is that apps won’t be physically stored inside the backups anymore; only the app’s data is saved and then restored to the phone. Every app is just referenced and then re-downloaded from the App Store, based on the user’s configuration. Nothing can go wrong, right? Well, try and do a restore from iTunes on a slow connection and you’ll get how things can go sour very fast.

After the first restore, the level of app inconsistencies on my iPhone 7 Plus was astounding. The phone started downloading and setting up apps I had deleted on my iPhone 6s months ago, though I had backed it up just minutes before restoring. Initially, the whole download process was simply slow; after half an hour, it came to a complete stop.

Dozens of apps were frozen on my home screen, neither downloading nor installing. Folders — forget about them! Apps I had painstakingly ordered in specific groups were randomly scattered over 5 screens. I tried to convince myself that it was the slow ADSL connection’s fault. I gave it time, lots of it, hoping the apps would sort themselves out on their own at the end of the setup process. 5 hours later, everything was still stuck in the same situation. That’s when I decided to backup my iPhone 6s again and repeat the restore process on the iPhone 7 Plus. Another two hours and the iPhone 7 started recovering apps from the App Store servers again: the right ones, this time, all neatly organized in their proper folders. After an hour of WiFi struggle, though, I still had to bring the phone to a friend’s place and hook it up to a faster network to make it get to the end of the process without further hiccups.

Moving data from an Android phone to a new iPhone was a breeze. I downloaded the “Move to iOS” app from the Play Store on my mom’s Honor 6, then I picked “Move Data from Android” on the iPhone 6. The iPhone shows a code that you need to type into the Android phone to establish a private WiFi connection. Before the process begins, you will be asked by the old phone to pick the data you’d like to transfer. I checked calendar events, contacts, Google account’s data, and bookmarks. I left out the photos, just because they were already backed up on mom’s computer, in order for her to sort them before syncing them back on the iPhone through iTunes.

Less than one hour later, boom: all done. The iPhone 6 was ready to be used and I let it download the missing apps from App Store (“Move to iOS” asks you if you want it to look for apps on the App Store that match all the apps you had on the Android phone). There’s only one issue with this method, and it’s Android’s fault: if Network Smart Switch (or any similarly named feature) is on, the phone might lost the connection with the iPhone’s private WiFi network, thus blocking the transfer. Turn any such feature off, forget any known network nearby from the phone’s setting, and you’ll be good to go. The time needed for the whole move to complete may vary, of course, based on how much data you’re moving.

In the end, except for the small (not so) smart WiFi issue that was fixed after a quick Google search, the Android-to-iPhone upgrade experience was much better than the iPhone-to-iPhone one.

It’s unacceptable.

I understand that Apple wants to wow the switchers, but why can’t iPhone owners get something similar in terms of simplicity and straightforwardness? Shouldn’t it be even easier to perform this kind of private WiFi sync over two phones out of the same blue-blooded breed?
Maybe in Cupertino they think that the current update process is good enough; or they trust that, if you’re not able to do it yourself, you will just have your data transferred by a Genius at the Apple Store.

When you’re moving to a (fairly recent) Android phone to a new one, Google’s OS even lets you flash all the data on the new phone through NFC. I would expect something similar or better from Apple, the queen of seamlessness.

A “Move to a new iPhone” app, maybe. For Woz’s sake: make it an iOS feature and advertise the hell out of it!
If Apple’s engineers were able to make “Move to iOS” work on Android, they definitively can do the same on iOS.

Despite all the progress we’ve experienced in the last few years, we still live in a world where a broadband connection might be too slow for remote backups; a world where people exist who will struggle to even download iTunes — hi, dad!

Instead of forcing all the loyal customers that just decided to stick with an Apple phone into a subpar experience, wouldn’t it be better to make it easier and claim, Apple style, that it just works?