You’ve seen the light. You’ve left Apple’s embrace and joined the happy world of Android, and you’ve got just one question: What about your stuff? How do you transfer everything from iPhone to Android? We can help with that.
If the apps you use are cloud based - such as Gmail for email, Spotify for streaming music and Facebook for seeing pictures of cats and other people’s children - you hardly have to do anything: it’s just a matter of installing the apps, entering your usernames and passwords and picking up from where you left off. Here’s how to transfer everything else.
Contacts
If you don’t already have one, sign up for a free Google Account: you’ll need it to do pretty much anything on Android. Once you’ve done that, backup your iPhone and then log in to iCloud.com. Click on Contacts, select the ones you want to transfer and then click on the little gear icon at the bottom left of the screen. You’ll see an option to Export vCard. Clicking on this will export the selected contacts in vCard format.
Now, log in to Gmail and click on Gmail > Contacts. You’ll see the option to Import Contacts in the left hand sidebar. Click it, choose the vCard file you just created and let Google do the rest.
Calendar
This is a little more complicated, but it’s still easy. Go back to iCloud and this time, open the Calendar app. You’ll see a list of your calendars in the left hand sidebar, and a little wireless icon next to each one. Click on that to open that calendar’s sharing menu.
What we want to do here is to create a public calendar we can then import into Google Calendar. To do that, click Public Calendar and copy the entire link you see on screen.
Open a new browser window or tab and paste the link, but don’t hit Enter just yet: you need to change the bit that says “webcal” to “http”. Do that and press Enter, and your computer should now download an .ics calendar file with a really long and incomprehensible file name.
Repeat this process for each calendar you want to transfer.
Now, we need to log in to Google Calendar and click on Other Calendars in the left hand sidebar. Click on the drop-down arrow and choose Import Calendar, and then select the .ics file you just downloaded. Clicking on Import will now add the events to the Google Calendar you select (if you have more than one). You’ll need to repeat the process for each calendar.
iCloud Documents
If you’ve been storing files in iCloud, you can get them by logging into iCloud.com, clicking on iCloud Drive and then choosing the appropriate app folder - but remember that some file types, such as Pages documents, won’t work in non-Apple programs. If you’ve got files in proprietary formats such as Pages, convert them to text or Word files in the Pages app before transferring them.
Bookmarks
Once again, the easiest way to do this is via iCloud. In your iPhone, go into Settings > iCloud and ensure Safari is enabled; now, go to your PC or Mac and open iCloud for Windows (PC) or System Preferences > iCloud (Mac) and do the same. If you haven’t already downloaded iCloud for Windows you can get it from here. What we’re doing here is ensuring that our iPhone bookmarks are being synchronized with our PC or Mac.
On Windows, the next step is to click Bookmarks > Options and then choose Firefox or Chrome. Click Apply and then Merge, and you’ll be told to download the iCloud Bookmarks extension for the browser you selected. This extention will sync your bookmarks from Safari to Chrome or Firefox.
If you chose Chrome the next step is easy: on a PC, open Chrome and log in to your Google Account, and the bookmarks will be synced automatically. On a Mac, open Chrome, click the “hamburger” Chrome menu at the right hand side of the window and select Bookmarks > Import Bookmarks and Settings and select Safari as the source.
Firefox is a little trickier for both PC and Mac. If you’re on a Mac, the next step is to open Firefox, choose Bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks and then click on the star icon in the toolbar. This brings up the importing and backup options. Select Import Data From Another Browser and choose Safari.
On both PC and Mac, the next step is to click on Firefox’s Tools menu and select Set Up Sync. This enables you to log in to your Firefox Account (if you have one) or create a Firefox Account (if you haven’t). Once you’ve entered the details you can then open Firefox on your phone and choose Options > Sync > Pair a Device to get the bookmarks onto Firefox on your phone.
Photos and videos
The easiest way to transfer photos is to drag them and drop them (if you have a Windows PC). Connect the iPhone via USB, open My Computer and look for the iPhone icon. Open it and look for the DCIM folder. That’s where your pictures are; just select them and drag them to a folder on your PC. You can then connect your Android phone and drag the files from your PC to your phone. If you’re feeling particularly flash you can connect iPhone and Android at the same time and drag photos from one to the other, but we’d recommend transferring to the PC first so you’ve got a backup of your pictures.
Things are slightly different on Macs, although the basic idea is the same. Instead of My Computer you’ll need to launch Image Capture to import your photos. Once you’ve done that you can connect your Android device and drag from your photos folder (or anywhere else you put the imported pics).
Music
This one’s a bit trickier. You’ll need Apple’s iTunes and Google Music Manager installed. First of all, in iTunes make sure all your music is actually on your computer: if there’s a little icon of a cloud with a downwards arrow on it, it hasn’t been downloaded. Make sure your purchased music is there too (it may be hidden in Preferences > Store > Show iTunes in the Cloud Purchases”).
Once you’re sure you’ve got everything, open Google Music Manager and in the setup page, select Upload Songs to Google Play. Specify “iTunes” as the source and let Google Music Manager do its thing.
Have you recently moved from iOS to Android? Was it painful or a pleasure? Let us know in the comments
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