Phone Migration Guides: All Four Directions

Phone migration is not one task. It is four tasks that share a name, and the difficulty between them runs from "twenty minutes, mostly automatic" to "hours of manual repair". That is why every guide here starts with a list of what moves rather than a list of steps: the steps are easy to describe, and the gap between "supports transfer" and "moved my call logs" is where people lose data.

The four directions, compared

The same tool can be strong in one direction and unusable in another. Find your row before you pick a route.

Two consequences follow. First, Android to iPhone is the weakest direction on the market and the one most reviews skip — our bench runs showed contact counts dropping on arrival, so it gets its own guide and its own warning. Second, "free" and "complete" answer different questions: the free built-in routes are excellent inside their own ecosystem and stop dead at the border.

Free route or paid tool?

Start with the free route. It is built into the phone, maintained by the company that made the operating system, and it will not install a browser toolbar.

Move to the paid column only when one of these is true:

• You are crossing platforms with data the free route refuses to touch — usually call logs, SMS, or WhatsApp on an older Android phone.
• You are moving between two Android brands carrying app data that clone apps leave behind.
• You need the old phone's messages readable in the new phone's own messaging app, not inside a third-party viewer.
• You are doing several migrations — family phones, a small office — and want one interface and one licence.

A paid tool buys coverage and a single interface, not reliability. In our own runs the failure mode was never "the software refused to start"; it was counts that did not match the source phone. That is why these guides tell you to count contacts before and after, and why the ranking page publishes the numbers we got.

What to do before any of this

Three steps, in this order, on the old phone while it still works:

1. Back up the whole device — iCloud or Google One, whichever ecosystem you are leaving. This is the fallback you will be glad about at 11pm.
2. Export contacts to a vCard and mail it to yourself. It is the only format every phone imports without argument.
3. Keep the old phone switched on and charged for a week after the migration. Half the "missing" data people report turns out to be a sync that had not finished.

Choose your direction

• Android to iPhone — the hardest direction, and why Move to iOS stops where it does.
• iPhone to Android — what Apple will not let you take, and the three routes that work.
• Android to Android — clone apps by brand pair, cable versus Wi-Fi, and the leftovers.
• iPhone to iPhone — Quick Start, iCloud and cable compared on storage, speed and setup windows.

Choose your data type

• Contacts — the one category that moves cleanly and free, plus duplicate merging.
• WhatsApp chats — the official transfer beats every third-party tool; here is what breaks.

Free routes and walkthroughs

• All seven free transfer tools — what each covers and exactly where it stops.
• Move to iOS, step by step — the twelve-digit code, timing, and the data it leaves behind.
• Samsung Smart Switch, step by step — cable, Wi-Fi and computer paths, including what it ignores.

How long it takes

Contacts and photos are a coffee break. A full Android to iPhone migration with messages and WhatsApp is a two-hour job once you count preparation and the reconciliation afterwards. Anything involving app data across platforms is a half-day — and the honest answer is that most people should skip it and reinstall the apps by hand.

If a guide does not cover your combination — an unusual brand pair, a locked phone, a work profile in the mix — write to editors@phone-to-phone.com with the two models and the data you need. Enough of those questions turn into the next guide.