Apple gives you three official routes, and one paid option for people who want neither iCloud nor a reset.
Quick Start: the default choice
- Turn on the new iPhone and place it next to the old one — both on power, both with Bluetooth on.
- Follow the pairing animation, then scan the swirling pattern with the old phone's camera.
- Choose Transfer from iPhone and keep the phones next to each other until it finishes.
Quick Start builds a direct device-to-device link. It copies everything the backup contains: photos, messages, app data, settings, wallpaper, and even Wi-Fi passwords.
- Speed: roughly 20–40 MB/s on modern iPhones, so 100 GB is a couple of hours, not a day.
- Catch: both phones must stay in range and on power. If you walk away, it pauses.
- Catch: the new iPhone must be new or erased.
iCloud restore: the fallback
If you set up away from the old phone, restore from an iCloud backup. It works, but has two hard limits: your iCloud plan must hold the whole backup, and restoring 200 GB from Apple's servers takes longer than a cable ever would.
Free-tier users get 5 GB, which is not enough for most people's photos alone. Buying 2 TB of iCloud storage for one migration and cancelling immediately is a legitimate strategy, but do the maths first — a month of 2 TB costs less than most paid transfer tools.
A cable and a computer: for awkward cases
Desktop tools exist mainly for two scenarios: you want a selective transfer (photos and messages, not settings), or you need to migrate without erasing the new phone.
- AnyTrans is the iOS specialist: incremental backups, iCloud content management, and per-category transfer.
- Coolmuster Mobile Transfer covers iOS to iOS for contacts, calendars, bookmarks and eBooks, without iCloud storage limits — narrower than Quick Start, but useful when Quick Start fails.
- EaseUS MobiMover is aimed at pulling files off a device rather than cloning it.
Which one should you actually use
| Situation | Use |
|---|---|
| New iPhone, both devices in hand | Quick Start |
| New iPhone, old one already sold or wiped | iCloud restore |
| 200 GB+ of photos and a slow connection | Quick Start over a cable, or a desktop tool |
| New phone already in use, selective move | Desktop tool |
| Corporate device with an MDM profile | Your IT department's route, not any of these |
What people get wrong
Starting Quick Start at 30% battery. It will pause. Charge both phones first.
Assuming iCloud covers everything. Apps that exclude themselves from iCloud backup — some banking, some messaging — come back empty. Sign-in state for two-factor apps often needs manual work.
Forgetting eSIM. On recent iPhones, the eSIM transfer happens during setup. If you skip it you will be re-requesting a QR code from your carrier.
Erasing the old phone too early. Keep it for a week. iCloud backups stop the moment you wipe it, and that is when you discover what did not come across.