Your correspondent has had a recent direct experience of of helping a colleague change from an Android Phone to an Apple iPhone.
They call these phones “smart phones” but the move from one to the other for any normal mobile phone user is terrible because there is no process that can help you move from one system to the other. In fact they have made life so hard that you will end up wasting a week or two of precious time moving from one system to the other.
It was clear that my colleague knew Apps cannot be moved, they have to be replaced but that was just the beginning…
Some banking apps and other similar “secure apps” failed to mention that the original phone must have the old app removed before the new app on the new phone can work… Please tell me how to remove something that you cannot locate if the Android is not working…
The answer is many hours waiting for advise from banks that require a working app to book an appointment! That is a combination of “smart phones” and “smart software engineers” (I wrote something less politically correct before writing “smart software engineers”…).
However, we assumed you can easily move things like calendars, emails, contacts and photos because they are simple pieces of standard data – but no, that was no easy task and the proverbial shit hit the fan. We tried to use apps that were designed by Android and Apple to assist with the move but nothing worked as it should. Contacts, photos, and other simple data was not moved as promised – and no other apps was found to do the job…
We checked the web for advice, but that was worse than asking a directions from a drunken horse. We should have known better. The advice was either out of date, too complex for even us to understand, or behind a paywall that other users had described as a ripoff!
It took two weeks to install, reinstall and read the instructions after hours on the laptop and on the phone.
You would expect that the three companies – Apple, Microsoft and Google could agree on basic standards. Alternatively, if these super monopolies want to keep us hooked on their services then we should demand that the EU and a few other big public bodies start to demand common standards for phones and the common data they store.
Competition cannot be impeded by these types of barriers, that are a huge drain on productivity.
