How to switch from iOS to Android | Articles | Phones

Most of us are used to one of the two most pop­u­lar smart­phone oper­at­ing sys­tems, Android or iOS. Of course, every­one has fans who can­not imag­ine life with­out the usu­al OSes. How­ev­er, it often hap­pens that you have to change your iPhone to an Android smart­phone. There may be enough rea­sons for this: a larg­er selec­tion of avail­able devices in dif­fer­ent price cat­e­gories, much more cus­tomiza­tion options, and so on. In any case, regard­less of the rea­sons, you will have to get used to a com­plete­ly new sys­tem all over again. The good news is that this is not at all dif­fi­cult to do.

Before trans­fer­ring files, how­ev­er, it is always rec­om­mend­ed to do a deep clean­ing and remove every­thing super­flu­ous — unnec­es­sary pho­tos, extra num­bers or use­less videos.

Use Google Drive

Whether you’re using Google Dri­ve for shar­ing files or stor­ing doc­u­ments, remem­ber that it’s per­fect for the sit­u­a­tion. It is with its help that you can trans­fer con­tacts, cal­en­dar data and pho­tos from iOS to Android.

To do this, launch the appli­ca­tion on your smart­phone and select the back­up func­tion (Back­up), then select the files and data you want to back up. Since the process will take some time, it is best to keep your smart­phone on charge and use Wi-Fi at a good speed. While copy­ing is in progress, the smart­phone should not be used again, and even more so, you can­not close the appli­ca­tion.

There are third-par­ty apps that can han­dle the back­up, but if you’re plan­ning to switch to Android, then as soon as you log into your account from your new smart­phone, every­thing saved on Google Dri­ve will already be in place.

Transferring data manually

If you don’t want to use Google Dri­ve, there is anoth­er way. Every­one knows that con­tacts on a smart­phone have long includ­ed not only a name and phone num­ber, so sim­ply trans­fer­ring a SIM card is not enough. In order to com­plete­ly copy the entire data­base of your con­tacts, plus oth­er files, you will have to work hard. There is good news — both Apple and Google fol­low a sim­i­lar scheme in this regard, with the only dif­fer­ence being that Apple uses iCloud for this, and Google has its own appli­ca­tion.

In oth­er words, you will need to trans­fer your con­tact data­base from iCloud to your Google account. To do this, you need to turn on iCloud sync. You can do this through the set­tings (Set­tings -> Name -> iCloud). Accord­ing­ly, it will be nec­es­sary to mark con­tacts, cal­en­dar and reminders.

After that, again, you need to wait — give the appli­ca­tion time to syn­chro­nize the data. It just does­n’t take much time — about 10–20 min­utes, depend­ing on the amount of infor­ma­tion. Once your files are in iCloud, it’s time to get off your com­put­er and sign into your iCloud.com account with your Apple ID.

Once you have accessed your account, click on the gear in the low­er left cor­ner of the screen and select the option “select all” and “export vCard”. This way you will save all the infor­ma­tion in a .vcf file.

The next step will be almost the same action in Google. You will need to log in to your Gmail account on your com­put­er, select “Con­tacts” in the top left cor­ner, and select Trans­fer Con­tacts in the left pan­el (or More->Import Con­tacts). Accord­ing­ly, choose the saved .vcf file and enjoy access to your con­tact list. A nice addi­tion — there you can auto­mat­i­cal­ly fix all the rep­e­ti­tions, to do this, select the option “Find and merge rep­e­ti­tions” or a sim­i­lar option in the mod­i­fied ver­sion after the redesign.

Understand apps

So we got to the main minus of the tran­si­tion from one plat­form to anoth­er — appli­ca­tions. The change from iOS to Android also means that all appli­ca­tions pur­chased in one store will have to be bought again in anoth­er. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it is impos­si­ble to trans­fer them in the same way as oth­er data. As a last resort, if the appli­ca­tion turned out to be expen­sive, you can find a more afford­able alter­na­tive to it.

Well, at least almost all appli­ca­tions are dupli­cat­ed for the App Store and Google Play, so you will cer­tain­ly find many of them in the new store. For exam­ple, all social net­works, mail appli­ca­tions and instant mes­sen­gers (except, of course, iMes­sage) are avail­able on Android in the same way as on iOS.

One way or anoth­er, in order to com­fort­ably find and install appli­ca­tions, check all those that are impor­tant to you. If you plan to down­load games and not lose your progress, be sure to con­nect your account via e‑mail or social net­works, since most games sup­port this fea­ture. Recov­er all accounts and make sure you remem­ber pass­words and oth­er access data.

Music Library

When it comes to music, there are three dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories. Music direct­ly on your device, music in the cloud, and music you sub­scribe to. The last cat­e­go­ry is accounts in Apple Music, Spo­ti­fy, and sim­i­lar apps. The great news here is that the apps are avail­able for Android, so you just need to log in from a new device to get access.

If you store music in the cloud, then there will be more incon­ve­nience. Only those tracks that are uploaded to the cloud via iTunes Match will be avail­able through the Apple Music app. But even this method should be trust­ed with cau­tion.

The surest and safest way is to trans­fer all the music from the cloud to your com­put­er, and then down­load it to a new smart­phone. On both Win­dows and OS X, the music is locat­ed in the user library under (My) Music —> iTunes.

You can drag and drop files to a smart­phone fold­er or copy and paste them on Win­dows through Explor­er. On a Mac, you will need to use the Android Trans­fer app. The task itself is quite sim­ple.

Download photos and calendar

This is one of the sim­plest steps you have to take, even eas­i­er than trans­fer­ring music. All you have to do is down­load the Google Pho­tos app on your iPhone, sync it with your Google Account, and upload your pho­tos to the cloud. The appli­ca­tion will ask you if this action is nec­es­sary.

This way you will get unlim­it­ed free stor­age space, unless you are embar­rassed by a slight and almost imper­cep­ti­ble loss in image qual­i­ty. If you want to keep your pho­tos in their orig­i­nal qual­i­ty, you can always expand the size of Google Dri­ve. 15GB is the stan­dard amount, and expan­sions are avail­able for a small sur­charge.

You can do all this through Smooth­Sync for Android (paid option) or for free by enabling cal­en­dar syn­chro­niza­tion between iPhone and Google in the set­tings.

Browser bookmarks

Anoth­er impor­tant step is the trans­fer of brows­er book­marks. There is noth­ing sur­pris­ing in the fact that you want to have access to all data even from your smart­phone. If you use Chrome as your main brows­er, then you just need to syn­chro­nize it with your com­put­er and all book­marks will remain on both devices. How­ev­er, it is clear that most of the iPhone users pre­fer to use Safari. To trans­fer book­marks from this brows­er, you need to go to Safari from a com­put­er or lap­top and select File -\u003e Export book­marks. You will get an HTML doc­u­ment which con­tains all the book­marks. You can then eas­i­ly trans­fer them to Chrome on your com­put­er, and syn­chro­niza­tion with your smart­phone will trans­fer them to it.

Delete data from iPhone

Once all data has been trans­ferred from iPhone to new Android device, the last step is to delete data from iPhone.

To do this, first of all, you need to dis­able the Find my iPhone option in the set­tings, oth­er­wise the iPhone will sim­ply be use­less for the new own­er. After you have dis­abled this fea­ture, it remains to go to Set­tings —> Gen­er­al —> Data reset —> Delete all con­tent. Once all your infor­ma­tion is per­ma­nent­ly delet­ed from your iPhone, you’re done — you can gift your old phone to some­one close to you or resell it with a clear con­science. A new and inter­est­ing inter­ac­tion with the world of Android awaits you ahead.

Of course, at first you will have to get used to it a lit­tle, because the sys­tems are not very sim­i­lar to each oth­er, but after a few days you will sure­ly learn how to quick­ly and con­fi­dent­ly use all the func­tions, eas­i­ly nav­i­gate the oper­at­ing sys­tem and cus­tomize it to your taste.