I've been running Android custom ROMs since Gingerbread days, on HTC HD2. At that time, I'd be flashing nightlies, switching between CyanogenMod and Paranoid Android, kernels, getting bootloops.
Setting up the phone was no big deal - most apps could be backed up with Titanium Backup, few that couldn't (e.g. banking) would just get redownloaded and I'd log in immediately. I was also still a student back then and had more time to tinker, but if it was anything like it is now, I would've given up much quicker.
In the last year I had to do few clean flashes with changing my phone, then updating LineageOS, and once the phone just wiped itself for no reason. Backups don't work for most apps - even if you can get one, they'll crash without a specific reason. 2FA everywhere is mostly security theater, with apps that have no business keeping my data but insisting on it, using SMS, email, authenticators, selfies. Banking apps needing two layers of root detection circumvention (because a custom ROM is already problematic, so you need root to stop them from detecting an unlocked bootloader, and then again not to detect root). Google insisting on sending a security check notification to a phone that's just been wiped with no ability to confirm that it's really you from your PC (but if you give it few minutes, it will give in and let you verify with SMS), always feels like hacking yourself.
It's a massive pain already on a clean, bloatware-free custom ROM, with a truly minimum app list. Once you need to start debloating the official OS, it's another hour or three, depending if they're nice and let you uninstall things or if you need adb access to disable offending packages.
It was the first app I ever spent money on, and I did so without any hesitation at all.
It was just genuinely useful to be able to back up and restore my own data on my own devices, and to do so on my own accord. It was a process that I owned, and controlled, and if it went wrong somehow then I was able to troubleshoot it and make sensible decisions.
I haven't had a rooted phone in a decade or so now. These days, backups allegedly happen -- somehow -- and the entire process seems to be both deliberately and inscrutably shrouded in mystery.
When I switch devices or reset to factory to try to fix an eSIM issue (or whatever I do that makes restoration a useful path today), then it's never clear before I start whether the backup/restore will magically work or if it will simply fail without recourse. The uncertainty demonstrates a reprehensibly terrible way to deal with backups.
I love Free software too, and I wish I could run more of my life on it, but it’s no longer my hobby. I like cars, too, but I don’t work on a hobby car. The author’s experience is why I use proprietary stuff like Apple for these parts of my life. A new Apple device is usually a non-event: charge it, authenticate, wait for the back to restore while you go about your business.
The cost of more freedom (in this case, from proprietary toolchains and data lakes) is needing to exercise more control (compiling custom Android images). I just, honest to god, don’t want to spend the time on it. A kid, a house, cats, getting old. I like that someone else has solved multi-device backup and restore, and I feel happy watching it happen so perfectly, even if I’m not the one controlling it.
Most of the author's criticisms were centered on avoiding account creation and third-party apps. I'm not sure I would give Apple the benefit of the doubt here since the motivations are different: Apple is far more interested in locking customers into their own ecosystem. On the Android front, that isn't all that different from getting a Pixel. Of course, getting an Android based Samsung adds an extra company who wants to do the same as well as selling space to third parties.
While Android being more open does add complexity, it is mostly limited to those who buy devices produced by another vendor or those who choose to exercise their freedom (e.g. by choosing to install a third-party version of Android, or installing a third-party "app store", or developing their own software).
Paradox is, that with Pixel device you can get most freedom and security togather. Installation of GrapheneOS is easiest custom ROM installation that could possibly be.
In theory you can use iPhone and iPad without apple account - basically as dumb phone. But of course you won’t get AppStore access.
Stock Android, and especially stock Samsung, is far from being a free software solution.
A turnkey solution based (almost exclusively, and except the driver blobs) on free software would be to buy a phone running something like /e/. I think they also provide backups.
Of course, stuff requiring SafetyNet (or whatever Google current oppressive attestation system) may not work (though microG makes some of it work).
Sort of. They use SeedVault, but a bunch of apps are not backed up. When restoring another set of apps do not properly restore
iOS/macOS is no better. My wife kept getting weird errors on her iPhone.
Turns out, her photos were only in the cloud and, quelle surprise, she had run out of room in "The Cloud(tm)" in spite of having almost half a terabyte free on her phone.
All the companies want to hold your data hostage.
storing things in the cloud is responsible
Having said all that, yes Android is pretty bad. I think it's the in the nature of platform owners to get their hooks into yoh as much as possible.
When I set up Linux Mint, there was none of this.
Play Integrity and Google's monopoly on providing "hardware attestation".
Convenience-wise, this is true both for the small daily stuff and large occasional stuff.
Day-to-day:
- For work I have to deal with .docx, .xlsx, .pots, and .pdf on a regular basis, both reading and authoring. Libreoffice mucks up formatting in both directions for Word documents. Web Office365 sucks in comparison to desktop O365. Linux PDF viewers are fine until you have to fill out a form and digitally sign one.
- Mechanical CAD: my team uses Fusion 360. There’s Windows and Mac versions. I haven’t tried it under Wine. I suspect it’d be painful. I’ve tried some OSS solutions. Not pleasant.
- ECAD: KiCAD has grown up and has become my primary ECAD tool. Hooray!
- Time Machine: for my Linux machines I have a great setup that pushes backups to Backblaze B2 using restic. For my current laptop, I plug an external drive in every morning and Time Machine does its magic. I also run the B2 script for off-site occasionally.
- Phone calls: OS X and iOS have fantastic hand-off. I do most of my work communication through Teams and Slack, both of which work fine on Linux. Phone calls, though... if my phone starts ringing, I get a notification on my laptop and can just click "Answer" to take the phone call through the headphones I'm already wearing.
- Clipboard integration: I actually started writing this comment on my phone and then decided to move over to my laptop. Copying it on my phone automatically put it in my clipboard to paste on my laptop.
Hardware compatibility:
- My last Linux desktop was fabulous. Happily drove a 4K display, I loved living in XFCE every day. There was one issue that was extraordinarily frustrating: if the machine sat unused for somewhere around 24-72 hours it would enter a very strange power state. The machine was still powered up to some degree, but was completely unresponsive. I could use it every day with no issue, for weeks. If I didn't use it for that 24-72h timeframe, boom, it would get into this state. This only ever happened to me while I was travelling. I did several deep debug dives into this to no avail, including at one point setting up the kernel logger to log over serial to another embedded machine. I pointed a security camera at it to see if, say, a cat or some other obvious physical thing was causing it. I ended up hooking up an Ethernet-controlled power bar so that I could power cycle it and access the data that was on it. Tried multiple kernels, many different kernel command-line options, never did get to the bottom of it.
- My older 2014 Mac Mini that sat next to it was bulletproof. I could do 98% of what I was doing with the Linux desktop machine remotely on that machine just fine. Mostly there were some embedded Linux tasks that wouldn't work well on the Mac.
OS Updates:
- My current phone (iPhone 12 Pro) is 6 years old. It's running the latest OS. You can have an experience like this with stock Android distributions if you very carefully research which vendors and specific devices use... I forget what it's called... Google One? My dev phone is a Nokia and it got updates for a long time. I don't remember when/if they stopped.
- The idea of having to custom compile or hunt down OS updates from a third party destroys the convenience of this for me. I want to spend essentially 0% of my life thinking about what to do for an OS for my phone or tablet.
- My old 10-year-old Macbook Pro finally stopped receiving updates a year or two ago. It runs Linux now quite happily. It's a fantastic Linux machine.
Occasional new device setup:
- Back to the article, the Apple "I have a new phone/iPad/laptop" story is just unbeatable. I couldn't even tell you what the steps involve because they involve virtually no thinking at all. It's roughly "hold your new device near your old device". You maybe have to log into it first. It requires no thought at all.
So you don’t have to do this, but if you don’t, you are under even more surveillance and experience more advertising.
Pretty mediocre -- not totally useless, but far from a seamless experience.
(It reminds me of the major car manufacturers ignoring what Tesla saw as vital - having a reliable trustworthy easy to use charging network was as important as the BEV itself.)
I set up a new one for my son on Christmas Eve and I almost gave up completely.
Recently I encountered a user that had created a new Google account when switching to a new device... on their last 5 devices.
So when they switched to the latest one and called me to set up the phone, I had to wrangle the contacts, photos, cloud storage and whatnot from all of those accounts.
Another pain point for me (in the EU/Balkans) is the transfer of Whatsapp and Viber. For reasons unknown, the accounts, contacts, chats, downloaded data can't be transferred during device setup. The only way to transfer data to a new device is to create a cloud backup on the old phone, which requires creating a wapp/viber account and setting up the google drive backup (local backup to a file? lol no. Any other cloud service available? lol no). Of course, when dealing with a media-heavy user (lots of photos, lots of memes/videos from group chats that are automatically downloaded to the phone), often is the case that the cloud storage tied to the google account doesn't have enough space for the backups, because it is filled with the automatic google photos backup that nobody turns off. And the user usually doesn't want to pay for extra space on Google because they don't understand why or just plainly don't want to.
So yeah, the transfer process is slow and complicated and full of traps, but it also offers an insight in to how much the imaginary "average consumer" doesn't care about this stuff and just agrees to everything offered.
I have that set up, and Nextcloud syncs the folder to my server
Due to this, I've resorted to backing up to drive without any media and then after restore, sync the media back via other means.
It's also worth mentioning that when you sync with drive, it doesn't preserve the time stamps of devices
for Viber I've only tried it via the backup on old phone and then restore that backup on the new phone
With Viber I don't know, I've never used that.
This does not work anymore. The chats are encrypted and the key to decrypt them is not in the backup files.
Telegram, due to not being e2e encrypted, is trivial to transfer, a new login does it.
It makes things a lot easier yes but you do give up a lot of privacy too.
And if we zoom out a bit, iPhones are only 20% of the global phone market. The overwhelming majority of the world uses android because, well, iPhones are expensive. There are plenty of places where an iPhone is still a status symbol. Even you think the author should have bought his parents iPhones instead, there is still a whole world of people out there who would benefit from improvements in the android ecosystem.
If I did want to do a lot of fiddling with the phone then sure, Android would be a better choice, but like I had said back in 2004, what I wanted more than anything else was a phone that would sync its contacts with my Mac.
That being said, even if you wouldn't have said it before me, I probably shouldn't have said it too anyway, because I suspect that globally speaking the GP is right. Most people don't buy flagships, yet everybody has a phone. And Apple doesn't even try to compete in "non-premium" market, it's strictly impossible to buy a new iPhone for the price of some Redmi or whatever, which isn't even noticeably worse than an iPhone, practically speaking.
Anyway, here is my experience when I upgraded from a Pixel 8 to Pixel 10 Pro: login to my Google account, let the backup restore happen then my new phone was identical to the old one.
I only had to do the login process to a few messaging apps like Signal or WhatsApp, and my home settings on Smart Launcher had to be manually imported but that's pretty much it.
Basically, a lot of what OP lists as "bare minimum requirements" are just preferences. If he used his Android phone like an iPhone, and like most people use it (with minimal tinkering) then the migration would have been just as smooth.
I've had a couple of Nexuses, a few of the Pixels, with a Nokia in the mix too. Never any problem - just log in, wait a few mins for the apps to automatically install and the data to backup/restore (which, iirc, happens over local wifi rather than going through the cloud). The last upgrade included a separate work profile managed by MS Intune, and that was also smoothly handled by the upgrade process.
Yes, Whatsapp chat history has to be handled separately (as others have mentioned) because of the e2e encryption. The only other thing that needs doing is confirming that I want Firefox as my default browser when I first run it. Otherwise, it's all completely hands-off.
I recently helped a family member set up a new phone and it took over 2 hours. Between 2FA migrations, app re-authentication, and trying to figure out which backup actually had their data, it was miserable.
Phone manufacturers have zero incentive to make cross-platform migration easy. Apple wants you to stay on iPhone. Google wants you to stay on Android. The user suffers.
I give a silent thanks every day that my dad still has a flip phone and no desire to upgrade.
This is one of the cases in which giving them an iPhone with its walled garden has great benefits. You can also setup parental control on top of that already locked down ecosystem.
Some things are actually worse on the iOS side. It took years for Apple to catch up with spam and scam calls/SMS detection.
Plain Google search is still the main vector of scams, I eventually set up NextDNS on her devices.
How incredibly sad this fact is. And even sadder all the second-level implications about how it got to this point. And then sadder still that there is unlikely anything done about it in the foreseeable future.
I screen her emails with her consent, very easy to do with Fastmail that imports her Yahoo mail into a folder she doesn't see and then I move okay emails to her inbox.
If you do go for a smartphone, my experience tells me that there's no difference between Android and iOS. The biggest sources for shady apps are the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. Shady stuff on the web can be easily defeated using an adblocking browser, which is essential for older relatives.
You know, they are adults and have free will and do want a smartphone like everyone else to use Whatsapp, read the news, search things on Google, etc.
Hell, my 95 year old grandma convinced a nurse to install TikTok on her phone because she saw her using it and also wanted to try it. It's not like we can isolate them from the world
Parental control is a also a hot buggy mess on iOS currently. Our daughter has an iPhone with parental control set up and a bunch of apps that are whitelisted regularly refuse to start at random moments (blocked by parental controls). We hoped that iOS 26 would finally fix it, but nope.
It doesn't really matter, both phone ecosystems are a mess, but in different ways.
It's not all good or bad, there's a security issue with side loading, as well as shovelware on the play store. However, there is no world where I would argue that these justify limiting consumer grade hardware to walled gardens.
I recommend getting an Android phone (there are cheap Google Pixels out there) and try to sideload an app. Also browse the web a bit without an adblocker. I'd be surprised if by the end of the experiment you thought that sideloading is the reason their grandma's phone is full of crap.
I don’t remember exact steps so there could have been a bit more. But it was an impressive experience and I told my geek friends about it. They were surprised this is the first time I used this feature.
Another issue on Android is that iOS allows for syncing data through the user's iCloud, which can be gigabytes in size, but Google has you use the Google Drive API which sucks and involves handing over credit card info.
The Android file transfer has another trick that Apple doesn't seem to do, which is fully offline local sync rather than going through the cloud. This has reliability issues and requires both devices to stay on and nearby while the transfer is in progress, but on slower internet connections the process can be a heck of a lot faster thanks to modern wifi speeds.
Transferring eSIM from one iPhone to another can be restricted by the carrier. Here in India, the second largest carrier (Airtel), does not support the native iOS eSIM transfer process. It’s a separate set of steps (the ones published on Airtel’s website won’t work, despite customer care claiming that it does). What works is almost like applying for a new or replacement eSIM.
1. The devices will offer to transfer data wirelessly, but won’t tell you that some data isn’t transferred. Instead using iTunes is a must as (in our case) more data is copied. This excludes data from managed apps - understandable.
2. When updating and recovering the backup on the new device is done, the regular setup experience starts. But, as your WiFi is also copied over, the device starts trying to update and install apps in the background, even before you logged into your Apple ID. So you’re constantly annoyed by popups asking for the ID. If you try to enter it, another pop up will interrupt amd stop you from entering the credentials. It even aborts touch/face ID setup and makes you start over again. I’ve had some colleagues starting over on Touch ID for like 5 times before they were faster than the popups. That mixes with popups for company accounts like mail credentials. And even a required change of the unlock password. Sometimes up to 10 different popups spawn in a few seconds…
Seriously, why? Is it that hard to stop these prompts till the setup is done and then prompt the user for everything needed once?
This is what we end up with: people who don’t understand enough to configure their own phones, and phones full of spyware under the control of consumer-hostile actors.
The most worrying this is that this doesn’t just apply to the elder: it also applies to the newer generation.
Contrasting it to my experience setting up iPhones is… dramatic.
Android phone manufacturers want $1200 for something that is a toy, just like the Apple iToys.
Nobody wants those, and nobody wants this. Google needs to get out of the business and let the FOSS community handle it.
Just because you don’t want it doesn’t mean <checks notes…> a billion or so people don’t want an iPhone. Or rather, a phone they don’t have to dick with straight out of the box.
OTOH, I don’t really even know what you’re on about. Android is a nightmare because…it’s like iOS, which is “take phone out of box, restore from backup, sorted”? That doesn’t even make any sense, especially in light of what TFA describes.
The article shows this is not true, if you know the similar process for iOS.
The article could be compared to the iPhone setup process. There are some preferences to uncheck, but there is no third party spying software on an iPhone when it arrives. Contrast to Samsung.
iOS devices are not toys, and even if they were there is value in toys, and even if there weren’t it is provably false that “nobody wants those”.
Furthermore, if Google dropped Android it is misguided to believe “the FOSS community” would handle it and everything would be roses. What you’d have then are a couple of hardware vendors (like Samsung) publishing their own forks and dozens of different incompatible open-source versions that would get no traction.
The biggest difference between setting up a Pixel and an iPhone I experienced was that Google asked for certain settings beforehand that I had to turn off in the settings after setup on iOS. Both would've been a lot faster if I hadn't tried to disable optional account stuff.
Contrast that to Samsung, especially their non-flagship models, where the setup wizard took forever because of the crap Samsung added to the process.
That said, I do appreciate some "tutorial" parts of the setup process on Android. When I first set up an iPhone, I got the distinct impression that Apple assumed I already knew how to do everything. Their interface isn't exactly intuitive if you haven't used iOS before, no matter what online forums may claim. It took me several tries and a Google search to figure out how to remove apps, for instance. Perhaps one might find it an annoying extra step you're going to skip as a power user who's used to the platform, but it felt strange to be dropped into a strange, new operating environment with no instructions.
I had mi phones before and they had only one hard requirement of needed a xiaomi account for developer mode. I circumvented it.
The article isn't just a pathetic piece of writting in general, it's also operating on tip top tier redditor-brained US-defaultism where "Android = Pixel/Samsung". I have no idea why the crowd here is letting it stick around.
Samsung as a company is a universal No Buy. The fact OP bought Samsung makes me raise an eyebrow.
Credit to Apple where credit is due. When I unboxed my first iphone, I was happy to give Apple all my personal information, birthday, emails, ssn.... It was bizarre, I'm usually apprehensive to give this stuff away, but Apple made it fun. Within a few days, I was disappointed by a lack of widgets, slow transitions between screens, and a buggy podcast app. But the damage was done, my company was out $600 and Apple had my contact info.
Plus, when they do something novel, they do it quite well. Their flagship phones have great price/performance if you buy them a month or two after launch (often for three quarters of the launch price + free earbuds/smartwatch + cashback), their software suite is quite complete and generally well-localised, and they have support channels non-English support channels available.
I do wish they'd fix some of their terrible software design crimes and stop the endless race to the bottom shoving product placement into their apps, but it's hardly a no-buy to me.
It's an android (11) flip phone but without Google store and without touchscreen, so almost nothing works on it
There's no setup, besides disabling the PTT button and making it open the application of your choice (as long as your choice is Clock, Voice Memo, or Music/FM Radio)
The ability to slam the phone shut to hang up, and call via speed dial without opening the "phone" app more than makes up for the lack of Instagram.
If you want a chatbot put 1800CHATGPT on your speed dial
And malls that replaced their maps/hours with QR codes but this seems to be a California thing so can be avoided by not being Californian
For people who buy subsidized Android-based phones from some carriers such as Metro by T-Mobile USA, they either come with bloatware baked in or they download the bloatware when you first activate the device or something like that.
These things are fairly easy to disable if you know what you are doing but if you don't know what you are doing, I can imagine people will simply put up with ads showing up every time you pick up the phone. It can get annoying VERY quickly.
I set up phones several times a year. What the author describes is not a problem if you go "all in" on your manufacturer. iOS or Android.
If you tick the cloud sync functions you can restore apps and copy data with a two or three step wizard. If you pay for the cloud storage level, you will have enough space for your photos etc. it's really a non event.
But if you don't go all in with your manufacturer. E.g you consider Google an untrustworthy custodian of your photos, or decide you'll stick with the free iCloud account etc. You're in for a world of tiny pains.
I have a Cat phone now. The actual manufacturer, Bullett, went bankrupt. Can't get the small rubber parts needed to maintain the waterproofing.
Suggestions?
In the former case the thing that needs to be removed is the entirety of the OS (and if that proves to be impossible, the device is returned or discarded), and in the latter it's a scan of all apps and removal of all unnecessary apps, my grandma does not need Samsung Galaxy Games, thank you very much.
I don't. I transfer any important data like photos to a real computer weekly
Mail, Calendar and Contacts are handled by IMAP and DavX. Passwords are in 1Password
I have minimal apps so setting up a new device wouldn't be too much trouble
TIL this exists. Here's hoping we see some type of NixOS + Graphene mashup one day.
Then after the first app updates is done, a notification comes with "let's finish setting up your phone" and again asks to setup voice assistant, check defaults and whatever else is in the flow.
Has no one noticed that the setup flow seems to run twice?
And it's not one specific device. I do it with eight to ten devices a year, from different OEM, writing reviews and testing. They all have the same behaviour.
Going through dozens of apps, doing logins, 2FAcand changing settings is a PITA.
Devs do a poor job on that front.
In my experience just about everything but WhatsApp and maybe Signal work out of the box for apps downloaded through GPlay.
To the best of my knowledge, it is basically impossible to fully transfer applications locally to new phones without root access.
The ONLY reliable way to transfer to a new phone:
- root your phone
- get NeoBackup (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.machiav3lli.backup/) and grant superuser permission to it
- do a FULL backup of the apps you want to transfer, that means it must also include "device protected data"
- restore apps on your new phone
If you'd like regular backups of apps: create scheduled backup with NeoBackup to a local folder and sync them with whatever tool you want to external storage. Good luck with that, you'll need it.
They have been talking to a manufacturer with the goal of getting a non-Pixel phone on the market that meets the requirements.
Friction can be good in life. Good food takes effort etc. When it comes to phones, there is the issue of privacy, security and phone addiction.
When the mobile is hard to use (eg Grapheneos - no offence), it can force you to use a real computing device for most of your needs
Excel on Mac has been closing the gap, but VBA macros from Windows colleagues still break regularly — sometimes silently, sometimes loudly. A workbook that runs perfectly on Windows will open on Mac and just do nothing, with no error. I've ended up keeping a Windows machine running purely because of macro-dependent spreadsheets.
QuickBooks is the more frustrating one. Intuit has historically treated the Mac version as a feature-lagged port — payroll features, industry-specific reports, and bank reconciliation behaviour all differ between platforms. The company essentially wrote the same product twice and kept them deliberately out of sync. Muscle memory from one doesn't transfer to the other.
The only partial escape I've found is pushing financial calculations out to platform-neutral layers entirely — whether that's a shared Google Sheet, a web-based tool, or an API. The moment the logic lives in a .xlsm file, you're platform-dependent again.
Insightful stuff. Adults buy iPhones.
Here's how you actually set up an Android phone:
- log into Google account
- select a few checkboxes (basically just if you want to restore apps or not)
- done, everything else is automatic
All the fuckery they decided to do because they think they're tech savvy wasn't required.
