Google set to make moving between Android phones much less painful

Google is taking steps to smooth up the transition from phone to phone, meaning your migration to your new Android phone could be a lot easier than it has been in the past.

Moving phones is part of modern life. Back in the dark day you’d have to save all your data to your SIM card and then move that to your new device, but when our phones became pocket supercomputers things got a lot more complicated.

Google has been improving the process over many years, using the cloud to backup devices, allowing cable or wireless transfers and more recently improving the step-by-step process you’ll go through to transfer content. But there’s one thing that still presents itself as a frustration: signing into all those apps you use.

For apps that are part of the Google Services that doesn’t matter – you just sign into your Google account once and all your data falls into place. But for the hundreds of other services that you use, you’ll have to input the details for every single app. Yes, it can be a little smoother if you’ve saved the password to Google, but it’s still a lengthy process.

It’s this area that Google is now addressing, with a new feature made available to developers that will make it possible for login credentials for an app to be saved to Android’s Credentials Manager with a new Restore Credentials process, according to details from 9to5Google.

The Credential Manager encrypts those details and this information can move over whether using the local restore options or using a cloud backup. So whatever method you use to setup your new phone, those app sign-in details should be included, so you can seamlessly get back into those essential services.

All that developers will have to do is enable the backup agent so that their app is included in the process. Some developers, of course, might choose not to – and some may insist that you go through the whole sign-in process for security reasons.

The new feature is currently in developer preview, so could be rolled out on devices from Android 9 and upwards.

Google has also recently released the first developer preview of Android 16, as the company steps up the pace and looks to deliver the next generation of Android and the new Pixel phones faster than ever before.