Arguably, the biggest hurdle to switching from iPhone to Android is transferring all your stuff. It’s painless moving from iPhone to iPhone, but changing platforms is a different story. Oddly enough, Apple is taking steps to make it easier. You read that correctly.
It seems that the days of feeling trapped in one ecosystem could be coming to an end. Last week, the tech world was taken aback when Google and Apple announced a joint venture to make it easier to switch between Android and iPhone. It’s expected to launch in an upcoming release of iOS 26, and we’re already seeing the early stages of it in the latest beta.
Apple has quietly slipped in a native “Transfer to Android” tool in iOS 26.3 Beta 1. The process appears to be pretty painless. In the settings, there’s a new “Transfer or Reset iPhone” menu. You just select “Transfer to Android, place your iPhone next to your new Android phone, wait for the devices to connect, and the transfer is all ready to go.
Next, you get to pick exactly what you want to transfer over. The options include photos, messages, notes, apps, passwords, phone numbers, and more. As you would expect, not everything can be moved. Health data, paired Bluetooth accessories, and locked notes are not included. Also, it’s not exactly clear how certain things will be migrated. For example, which app will Apple Notes be transferred into? Android doesn’t have a default notes app to look for.
To their part, Google has already implemented its half of the bargain in the latest Android Canary build. This should be a massive upgrade over the existing Move to iOS and Android Switch apps on each platform. A fully native, built-in method is better for everyone. It’s just unfortunate that regulatory pressure is the reason for it.
MacRumors via Android Authority
5 Android Features Apple Should Copy on the iPhone
I’m about two years into my switch from Android to iPhone—and I’m not having a good time. While I love my Mac, my iPad, and all my other Apple stuff, I just can’t get comfortable with Apple’s best-selling product. There’s a long list of things that annoy me, and you’re going to hear about them at some point, but one subset of qualms come from features that I miss from Android. Apple often gets mocked for introducing features that Android’s had for years, but logically you’d want the company to copy all the best stuff from the competition, right? For me, these are the features I miss the most.
