How To Switch From iOS To Android: Easy As Pie

Last month, my former colleague and New York Times reporter Vindu Goel wrote about his experience switching from Android to iPhone. He called it a "rocky transition" after he ran into obstacles moving over data like photos between phones. He warned that the experience, even with Apple ’s switching app, required patience and persistence.

The move from Android to iPhone makes Goel one of the “switchers” that CEO Tim Cook said were so important to the continued health of Apple's iPhone business, which after years of growth, is in decline.

I’m a switcher too, but not the kind that Cook is counting on. I recently dumped my iPhone 6 in favor of Nexus 6P, running Google's Android. (Before any Apple fans accuse me of disloyalty or bias, consider my household's tech gear post-switch: two Macbooks Air, one iMac, one MacMini, two iPads, two iPhones and a couple of iPods; just two Nexus devices, counting my new phone; no Windows PCs; no Chromebooks.)

So why did I switch? Because my wife's iPhone broke, and I decided to give her mine so I could try something new. (I hadn't used Android since I dumped my HTC Droid Incredible, circa 2010.)

How hard was the switch? Not hard at all. And I didn't even know Google offered tips on how to do it.

I’m not saying that switching from iPhone to Android is necessarily easier than the other way around -- at least not for everyone. Whether switching is smooth or bumpy has likely less to do with which direction you're going (iOS to Android or vice-versa) and more with how you use your old phone and how you plan to use your new phone.

Goel wrote that his troubles started at the outset, when he tried to move data like photos and contacts from one device to the other. In my case there was no data to move around – at last not data I cared about. Why? My photos were in Google Photos so they all showed up on my new phone automatically. (I had switched from Apple’s Photo app, formerly iPhoto, last year because I like the simplicity and features of Google’s service better.) Similarly my contacts, calendars and emails were either in the cloud or synced through my work Exchange server. So all that data showed up on my new device.

Downloading my apps, of course, involved manual work. It took perhaps 30 minutes and it was a pretty painless process. I put my two phones, new and old, side-by-side, and went app by app through every screen of my iPhone to make sure I got all of them. I also immediately placed the apps in the exact same configuration on the screens of the Nexus to maximize the familiarity of the user experience and minimize potential confusion. (Since I don't play a lot of games, I didn't care much about Game Center data. But if you are gamer, I suspect parting with that data will be more painful.)

I got used to the new phone after about a day. The biggest adjustment involved the badge icons on the iPhone, which alert you to the number of unread emails or Facebook notifications since the last time you checked. Android doesn’t do that, and while there are third party hacks to get badges, I decided against it trying to install them. Within 24 hours, I got used to taking advantage of Android’s notifications, which in many cases offer more detail than those on the iPhone. (Overall, I can't say I have a strong preference for either Android or iOS. When it comes to meeting my needs, they're fairly comparable; they both to the job well.)

That’s not to say there were no hitches. The first had to do with iMessage, which I had happily used on my iPhone. Because I hadn't bothered to read any instructions before I undertook the switch, it took me a couple of days to realize that I wasn’t getting texts from some of my friends and relatives. It turns out that if you don't "deregister" iMessage, the messages sent to you by other iMessage users will not reach you. Fortunately, Apple has helpful instructions for how to do it, and once you do, texts from other iMessages users will reach you via SMS .

The other small hurdle was music. While I rely increasingly on cloud services like Spotify and Pandora , I still cherish the familiarity and comfort of my iTunes library. It's made up of music I've owned for years, including dozens and dozens of CDs that I painstakingly ripped onto iTunes (remember when that was a thing people did?). It turns out there are various ways to move an iTunes library over to Android. I opted for using Google Play Music, which proved incredibly easy. I went to Google Play one of my household's Macs (as noted above, I have four of them), and with a simple click got the upload started. It took a couple of days to complete but it all happened in the background.

Of course, now all the music I own is in the cloud, which means I have to stream it. But downloading what I want onto my device for the times when I don't want to -- or can't -- stream it is trivial. And there's another advantage: if I ever decide to switch back to iPhone, there's one less thing to worry about, since my favorite tunes are also now neatly organized in the cloud.