Phone Migration Woes

I'm on iPhone 17 now. Despite all my publicly heralded views about not replacing phones (and cars) too often, I pulled the trigger. Well, to my defense, I still drive the 2005 Subaru Forester. And the 15 is going into really good and caring hands.

The key reason for the upgrade has been the telephoto lens, upgraded from 3x to 4x optical zoom and from 12 megapixels to 48 megapixels. That let Apple introduce the 8x feature which is basically the 4x optical and 2x crop (equivalent to 12 megapixels, albeit with smaller pixels).

On top of that ShiftCam promises a 240mm (equivalent) Super Zoom Tele add-on lens. I'm yet to see how it works as mine is somewhere in transit. More when it arrives. For the iPhone 15 I bought the Tele 58mm Mobile Lens from Moment, but it has been a lie. While it can be physically mounted on the iPhone's periscope telephoto lens, it does not work well. Only with the standard 1x lens, so not much long lens joy. 

And I love taking photos with long lenses. Have tried many setups, like this one: https://headworx.slupik.com/2025/03/long-pocketable-zoom.html, but nothing beats the convenience and readiness of the phone in the pocket. Also combined with the super easy in-place workflow of image correction and fine tuning. See the snaps I took last week in Venice, Italy. True, a DSLR would deliver much better "punch", but I just enjoyed the afternoon walk at sunset and the morning in-the-dark run.

So I'm pretty sure I'll make a good use of the upgraded 4x / 48mp and 8x / 12mp modes.

But back to the migration process itself - it has increasingly become tedious and painful. Despite the iCloud backup and other efforts by Apple, it roughly takes a day to move everything. And a lot of manual work. Plus you need a really good WiFi connection AND (in my case) also cellphone signal coverage (despite having the WiFi calling enabled). The financial applications are most painful, as every single one requires re-authentication with the bank. And for many the working old phone is also a must, to speed up the authentication requests.

Some apps (Adobe Lightroom is the best example here) restore in full, completely unattended, including the app data (photos in this case). But most require signing up again, authenticating and then re-downloading the offline content.

Finally there are some very weird quirks. I have a fairly substantial music library, originally maintained in iTunes since about 2005. It was synchronized to the old iPhone and working very well. Now it has restored from the iCloud, but the songs don't play, with the weird message "not available in your country or region". Come on, these are songs I bought. And they were playing just fine on the old phone. Now after migrating to the ne phone they don't. I will try to re-sync the library from my computer using iTunes and a cable. But generally - moving to a new phone is today (despite all the progress) almost as painful as moving to a new PC.