The experience of switching from one Android phone to another has never been great, especially considering the seamless iPhone upgrade experience that Apple users have had for a long time.
The Android upgrade experience is about to get a whole lot less painful now thanks to a new “Restore Credentials” feature rolling out to app developers.
The new feature allows developers to generate a ‘restore key’ for the app and the user after you’ve authenticated yourself within the app on the old device. This is stored locally on your device and backed up to the cloud, but you can opt out of backing the key to the cloud if you wish.
When you go about setting up a new Android device and you choose to restore apps and data from a cloud backup the restore keys that were created on your old device are transferred to your new device, where they will sign you into the app automatically.
If you prefer to transfer locally from your old phone to the new one, the restore key is transferred across to the new device.
If the app developer has enabled the feature, you can also start receiving notifications and other prompts as soon as you start using the new device – even if you haven’t opened the app yet.
Unfortunately this new feature requires app developers to implement the backup and restore functionality so we will be at their mercy. It would work so much better if Google either did this themselves or made it compulsory for the app developers to implement it.
Hopefully app developers start implementing this ASAP to help Android users restore apps and data with minimal pain.
Scott is our resident open technology expert. If you can mod it, or want to use it your way, Scott has probably done it. From Laptops to phones, headphones and game consoles, he’s played with it and wants to see the next generation.
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