Switching Ecosystems

My mother has recently decided she wanted a proper smartphone, mainly to be able to take photos and have a decent mobile screen to see photos the family has been sharing with her. But there were other reasons too. She's been increasingly more using WhatsApp and maintaining that application on her old hybrid LG Wine was a pain due to very low memory (4GB) available on that phone.

Technically the Wine was running Android. I thought iOS might be a better choice for her due to less options, lower overall complexity, and overall less places where something could go wrong. an I found a factory refurbished iPhone 6 could be bought for a very decent price - in the range of $250.

Also my experience in running a full Google ecosystem on an iPad was telling me she could continue running Google apps on the iHardware.

The migration was not that smooth however. Exactly two applications that I do not use on the iPad - Phone / Contacts and WhatsApp gave me head-aches.

It seems that Apple does not allow Google Contacts on iOS. You must use Apple Contacts. Fortunately there are 3rd party "sync" applications that can import / export / synchronize iPhone contacts with the Google Cloud. But they do cost money and do not work in the background. You have to remember to sync manually from time to time. But at least they work as advertised.

WhatsApp made me angry. On Android it backs up the conversation threads to Google Drive. On iOS it does that on iCloud. But you just cannot move the history from Android to iOS. There are some pretty complex applications for Windows that try to move the WhatsApp database from Android to a PC and then to iOS. But despite spending good couple of hours and more than a couple of dollars on them, I did not succeed in moving the database. I am very surprised WhatsApp on iOS just does not let you restore the database from a Google Drive backup.

In the end we decided the old conversation threads were not that important and we could live with just rebuilding the contacts database. But the lesson learned is you still have to be careful when switching ecosystems. I thought I had this sorted out by living everyday life with a Windows laptop, an iPad and an Android phone. Once again the devil is in the details and surfaces unexpectedly...