Sysadventures: Switching from Android to iPhone

I took the plunge and switched from Android to iPhone the other day. And with this post I just want to quickly jot down some of my experiences with this migration.

I had forgotten how untrained dictionaries can be #

Over time you grow accustomed to your phone and in many ways it grows accustomed to you. This is especially true considering smartphone dictionaries. I’m a bit curious as to how other people cope with bad autocorrecting behavior.

When I booted up my iPhone I chose English as the main language because that makes it easier to google something if I ever run into an issue. But I got into trouble when the phone started autocorrecting Norwegian to English.

It’s really frustrating having to send an sms from a brand new phone and it keeps fighting you. Even though I enabled both Norwegian and English dictionaries I found that the Norwegian dictionary was somehow lacking quite a few words. Like, it would have “hei” but not “heisann”. I actually considered sending an sms in English just to be able to write a sane message quickly.

Some time later I thankfully remembered that I’ve been using Swiftkey for several years on my android phone. I ended up syncing Swiftkey to the cloud and installing it on my iPhone with my dictionary data. Voila! A well trained autocorrect setup on a brand new smart phone. Though sadly I still get a ton of red underlines even though the autocorrection has stopped fighting me.

SMS and contact data #

For Android users coming to the Apple ecosystem there’s a service called Move to iOS. It allows you to transfer various data from an Android phone to an iPhone.

It failed me the first time I tried. Not sure why. It might have been because it was transferring a lot. Most of the data to transfer were very small except the photo library which was 16gb. The process would hang after a while and not proceed. It was also unclear whether or not I had been using a lot of mobile data. When setting up the transfer I ensured that both my Android and iPhone devices were on wi-fi. But when the process started up the iPhone would consistently switch to a mobile data connection. Suddently it becomes expensive to move 16gb of photos around.

I tried again later and skipped migrating photos because I could transfer the photos later in a different way. Successful migration! I thankfully got to transfer my sms history from my old phone to the new one.

Passwords and accounts #

For my passwords I use KeePassX which is a password manager that manages a password vault file. I ensure that this vault file is synced across my devices including a small network attached storage (NAS).

Protip: Configure your email accounts on the smartphone early on. It’s a chore but also a great help. When I was installing and setting up applications by logging into services like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Slack etc. I got quite a few warnings and confirmation requests over email.

And so it goes. I’ll probably write another post in the future to do a brief experience check-in some months later. :)