We don’t think anyone will be surprised to learn that Google is working on Move to Android, an app with a rather explanatory name and that therefore, as you may have already deduced, has the function of acting as an assistant for those iPhone users who, at some point, decide that they have had enough of Apple’s smartphone and, consequently, decide to leap iOS to an Android-based phone.
Google’s answer to Apple’s ‘Switch to iOS’
But let’s go to the source: both companies, Apple and Google, have always been looking for ways to attract users from the other platform to theirs. We remember, for example, quite a few years ago, a guide signed by Eric Schmidt himself, CEO of Google between 2001 and 2015 and current president of the company, in which he indicated the simplest steps, at that time, to migrate from iOS to an Android phone. That the company’s CEO himself published such a text was, to say the least, surprising.
The main response, by Apple, was to create Switch to iOS, an app that you can find in the Android app store and that tries to facilitate the migration from one platform to another, a very smart move, and that surprisingly had not found replica until now. Until now, because as we can read in 9to5Google, the search engine company is already working on the Move to Android feature.
Specifically, the Move to Android feature would be added to the Android Data Restore tool, which allows migrations between two devices running Google’s operating system. And the new feature has been detected by examining the code of a beta version of it. It is important to clarify this, as it is possible that the feature may not eventually arrive, but given the existence of Move iOS, Google will most likely go ahead with Move to Android.
In addition to some direct mention of Move to Android, and its hypothetical presence in Apple’s App Store, what they have found by analyzing the guts of this beta, is that this assistant would be able not only to move data from iOS to Android, but also try to do the same with apps or, at least, with those that are available on both platforms and that are not paid.
An interesting aspect is that the operation would not be done via cable or with a PC in between. To use Switch to Android, and after installing the app on the iPhone, the user would have to establish a connection between the two devices via WiFi, specifically in a specific network set up for this purpose, and in which the Android phone would be the access point. Then it would be necessary to use a shared security key between both devices, as well as enter some additional keys to migrate certain content.
We have to admit that we are curious to know how Pass to Android could bypass certain iOS security limitations to access some of the data that would be migrated to Android. And is that the strict security policy of Apple’s operating system raises some doubts in my mind.
