Hacker News Reader

Comment by arkitaip | Hacker News Reader

Android takes care of your contacts, passwords, wifi settings, browser settings, photos, etc. It requires a Google account but it's astonishing how quickly you can set up a new phone by simply logging into your Google account.

What's missing is better media management for third party apps like WhatsApp and Telegram so important photos and videos are backed up while unimportant ones are ignored and even discarded regularly. Every single family member's phone I've had to deal with has had this issue ("why is my phone out of storage when I barely have any apps installed?!" Meanwhile, WhatsApp is storing 20GB of funny videos).

View on HN

> Android takes care of your contacts

Google contacts.

, passwords,

Google app passwords.

> wifi settings,

Because you can't not use Google's app for it.

> browser settings,

Google Chrome settings.

> photos,

Google photos.

> etc.

(As long as it's in a Google app.)

> it's astonishing how quickly you can set up a new phone by simply logging into your Google account.

After ten years or so of using Android I finally bit the bullet and enabled Google backups to transfer stuff to my new phone a few months back, and I was astonished at how fucking nothing gets backed up that isn't already in a Google cloud synced app. What's the point? Every single other app I had to manually figure out how to transfer and restore, because all Google doing is to "helpfully" prevent me from backing up my data for "security" reasons.

In my experience a lot of apps back up their data to Google when you enable the Google backup setting. When I transferred to my new phone I had to reconfigure some security apps, but a lot of settings and data was automatically transferred from my old phone through the backup mechanism.

What's missing is alternate backup destinations. I'd like to see the option to backup applications to any cloud provider rather than specifically Google.

Meanwhile, switching to a new Iphone is basically like transfering it to a brand new phone. Quite fascinating.

I agree that the Whatsapp photo backup issue is fairly pressing on lots of devices - my partner's phone runs low on storage all the time, and when I clean it out for her it's always because I find that her Whatsapp group chats are eating ten gigs of storage with videos and photos she doesn't care about. But dumping them all is also pretty problematic because she works on the assumption that the ones she cares about will be there.

The big problem is game data backup. The market has bluntly rejected Google's opt in system, and something needs to be done.

Users care far more about the stuff that isn't backed up in Android, not the stuff that is. And far too much backup is hidden behind opt-ins that regular users just skip during backup. It needs to be on by default and opt out.

I find their "Junk files" feature in the new Files app very useful for clearing up space:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com