Android Is Making It Easier Than Ever to Switch Phones: You’ll No Longer Need to Log Into All Your Apps

Switching phones can be a hassle. This often isn’t because you can lose your photos or chat history, considering those issues are easy to avoid. The real challenge is the tedious process of logging back into each app. While signing back in to a couple of apps may be manageable, most people have many more installed on their phones.

Fortunately, the latest Android feature is here to ease all your pain.

Switching to a new phone. In recent years, transferring data from one phone to another has become much easier. You can simply restore your backup from the cloud or connect your new device to your old one via a cable and let Android handle the transfer.

When you turn on your new phone for the first time, you’ll have everything you need: your photos, apps, settings, wallpaper, and even the layout of your icons. However, even though the apps are there, you still have to log into each one individually.

A frustrating process. Users want to fully enjoy their new phones immediately, so manually logging into all the apps can be frustrating. Not remembering all your credentials can add to this annoyance because you may need to go through the account recovery process. Ideally, everyone would use password managers, but that’s rarely the case.

Restore Credentials. On Wednesday, Google introduced a new feature of Android’s Credential Manager API called Restore Credentials to address this issue.

According to the Android Developers Blog, Restore Credentials allows apps to “seamlessly onboard users to their accounts on a new device after they restore their apps and data from their previous device.” In other words, you’ll be automatically logged in to your apps.

According to Google’s developer relations engineer Neelansh Sahai, “There’s no developer effort required for the transfer of a restore key from one device to the other, as this process is tied together with the Android system’s backup and restore mechanism.”

How does Restore Credentials work? When a user logs into an app, a restore key is generated and stored locally and in the cloud. The restore key is also retrieved when the user sets up a new phone and retrieves their apps. The app can then use this key to log in automatically.

Notably, everything happens in the background without any action needed from the user.

Image | Daniel Romero

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