Currently, if you want to bring data from your iPhone to an Android device, you need Google Drive’s help. You’ll have to first create a backup of everything from your iPhone in Google Drive and then download it on your new Android phone. This still doesn’t transfer your apps. The new “Switch to Android” app will seemingly make things simpler, and more importantly, bring your apps over as well. Evidence of this upcoming app was found inside the Data Restore Tool for Android. Data Restore Tool might not be a familiar name but it’s an important part of Google’s mobile OS. It comes preinstalled on most Android smartphones and lets you restore data from your old phone when you switch to a new one. Although it existed as part of the Android experience for quite a long now, Google only recently published the app on the Play Store. An APK teardown of the latest version of the app has now revealed some information about Google’s “Switch to Android” app.
The new Google app will make switching from iPhone to Android easier
By the looks of it, the “Switch to Android” app will facilitate the data transfer over a local Wi-Fi network (hotspot) rather than a USB cable. The strings reveal that Data Restore Tool will tell users to download the “Switch to Android” app from the App Store on their old iPhone. They will then need to connect their iPhone to their new Android phone via a Wi-Fi hotspot. This is how Apple’s “Move to iOS” app works as well. The Data Restore Tool and Switch to Android apps will handle the rest of the work on their own. As 9to5Google notes, while this will automatically install the Android equivalents of most iOS apps from your iPhone, you’ll have to separately purchase the Android version of any paid apps. Nonetheless, “Switch to Android” will seemingly make the transfer of files and data from an iPhone to an Android smartphone a lot easier and seamless. We will be keeping an eye on when it goes live on Apple’s App Store. It could arrive before the Android 12 or Pixel 6 release this fall.
