I got my wife a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G – first days didn’t go smoothly
The first thing I learned when I started the process of transferring my wife’s Samsung Galaxy S9+ to the Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G was that none of the photos had backed up for a long long time. The next thing I noticed was that even though Google Play auto update on any connection was turned on, it hadn’t updated anything in a seriously long time.
This meant it was over a day before I even got to moving the phone’s content off. We’re not even going to get into how there’s still no way to retrieve her Samsung account because evidently the birthday is wrong somehow, and the tech support refuses to read a single line of the ticket, that’s yet another story.
So firmware, all Google Play apps, all photos synced, I dove into the Smart Switch app which I had been told by many transferred everything and I was a unique use case where it did not. Nope, exact same issue with a fully updated unrooted S9+. Applications, a couple of accounts transferred, but no application data. As I recall FB and no FB logins transferred.
This lead to none of her games transferring, her work’s security login two factor authentication app failing requiring her to use the old phone for a couple of more days, and me opening a couple of support tickets with some app vendors who can’t write transfer instructions for crap. Oh, you want me to press “log in” – those words literally do not appear in your app. Settings? You don’t have a settings menu… haven’t since 2016.
What did transfer thankfully was the text messages. That and the Google accounts seemed to be the only real use as none of the apps had any data if they weren’t connected to Facebook, Google, etc. RIP Stinky Cat game my kids used to love.
What happened on day one was interesting – after having updated all the apps on Kim’s phone we went out. I asked her to navigate to the place we were going and Google Maps crashed and crashed and crashed. As I was driving I just asked my google to locate the place and when we got there I got a chance to look at it. The Google Maps app along with 26 or so other apps, all of which had supposedly transferred from the old phone after having been updated (and on the same Android revision,) needed updates.
Updated Google Maps for the second time that day, and it started working again. We also experienced some unexplained connectivity issues that I suspect were related to a Samsung update going on, hours after the transfer. I’m still really surprised how bad the phone acted on day one.
Really should be a huge warning that app data will not be transferred and you should run updates on the new phone even if you just ran them on the source phone.
