Sliding from iOS to Android Despite Whatsapp and Signal

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Recently I switched from an Iphone SE from 2020 for a Fairphone 4 and the migration has been easy, except for two apps. Whatsapp and Signal. With Android it’s easy. You backup to Google Drive and you can slide between Android devices with ease. With iOS the backup is in iCloud so sliding between devices should, in theory, be easy to, but I don’t remember finding it that much fun. If it wasn’t for this apps we could slide from Android to iOS and back without a second thought.

My biggest fear was losing the groups that I am part of but I found that groups on Whatsapp sync with ease. The same is true of Signal. Message history is lost when you move whatsapp and signal from iOS to Android and vice versa. Migrating means losing access to years of messaging history, until you slide back to iOS or Android.

With almost every other app you can be simultaneoulsy one two or more phones at once. This means that whether you have a sim card or not you’re connected and active. With Signal and Whatsapp you can be across several computers at once, looking at message history without a second thought.

Linked Devices

As I wrote this post I decided to experiment with Linked Devices and it works. The concept of Linked Devices is simple. You have your primary phone that is connected to whatsapp. With Linked Devices you can use laptops, and now other phones as secondary devices. This gives us the freedom to slide between devices. When you are between Android and iOS this is a great feature to have because it makes sliding between plattforms simple.

No need for Two Phones

Yesterday I went for a five kilometre run. I got to the lake side, took pictures with one phone, but had to use the second phone to send them, so I took photos with the second phone. Signal has a huge advantage over Whatsapp in that if you slide between phones it will keep your message history intact until you log in again,

Platform Specific Apps

You might think “But what about platform specific apps, especially paid for apps?” . My biggest frustration is related to Car play and the cars I drive. You can’t swap OS on a car as easily as you can carry two phones. It’s the car that held me back on sliding to Android for months. I would love for cars to use car play when they detect an iPhone, and the Android equivalent when they detect an Android device. For now I need to have the iPhone when using cars.

And Finally

In practice things have improved since the last time I migrated from Android to iOS so the process is now simplified. We don’t need to migrate fully from one platform to another. It’s much easier to slide from one to the other and back.

For those that need it, it is now possible to have two whatsapp accounts at once, on a phone. This could be useful with dual sim devices. It’s also useful to have a backup groups option when sliding between mobile phone operating systems.