Android to Android new phone transfer experience

 I've had maybe 4 phones in my life, the first was a TracFone, the next x2 I just went to the dealer for, paying for a new phone + activation fee.

My latest phone is a Samsung a15, coming from a Samsung j7.

After chasing a red herring concerning microsim vs nanosim, I realized that the j7 was switched to nanosim in its last 2 years of production, when I bought one. I kept reading that I would need to obtain a nanosim when I already had one, since most or maybe all typical modern phones use nano.

I'll mention I briefly tried to use a tcl 10l first, but it had shutter lag, & wouldn't let me save a pro photo setting template. To top it off, it was not fully compatible with MetroPCS. So I diverted to the Blu g84. The blu g84 did not have flash available during pro photo mode, & also would not allow split screen ratio adjustment in landscape mode. it also had some weird bug where it wouldnt accept my sd card as formatted, making me back it up, reformat, then repopulate (more on that in a second). pain in the ass. obviously it also wouldnt run samsung apps so i impetuously deleted all 600 of my samsung notes after backing up to pdf, only to realize it didnt save the titles of the fucking notes so i now have 600 untitled notes & i ended up using a samsung device anyway so none of it was necessary. 

The first hurdle was getting apps/data to transfer. I tried Bluetooth tether, cord tether, wifi direct tether, quick share tether, NFC tether, Samsung backup, Google one backup, Google drive backup, (ill never use Microsoft OneDrive). They were all failures.

What finally worked for me is using the file manager app from playstore to manually make an APK portable of each app I wanted. many of my favorite apps like hancom office & wavepad are incompatible with new phones.

To get my contacts & SMS i used dropbox backup but I had to use a specific backup & restore app from playstore on both phones.

Then another hurdle, when I tried to insert my old SD...the newer android couldn't run it & asks me to FORMAT IT.

I managed to not accidentally delete everything & made a basic image file + copy/paste clone of the SD. I used macrium reflect & it worked great & it was easy.

Then I formatted the SD in the phone, popped it back out & brought back over the files that weren't system files. (this was for the blu g84, i could have skipped this entire problem if i had just gone for the samsung a15 off the bat).

Finally, I bypassed the activation fee by going on mymetro & manually entering the new IMEI code from the new phone.

I also picked up a handy tip, at one point early on, I was stuck on a frozen boot & learned that holding power+volume up for a long time bypasses the freeze & opens the reboot/reset menu.

 

I had to find other new essential apps, Openweather for live weather, 

VLC for mp4 & mp3, 

Collabora office for Rtf, Docx, Word, & Pdf reading/editing, 

& Dark Note as a better version of samsung notes with actual export tools & dynamic/intuitive visual organization. No ads, no iaps, doesn't send or collect your data & they're free. That's fuckin hard to find.

Also, fuck Microsoft so hard & their subscription scams.

A major fucking annoying afterthought about the samsung a15, & apparently all the new samsung stuff, is that you cant shut off the camera shutter sound or assign a different sound like you used to be able to. a fucking basic function once again fucked up by dipshit devs.

i found a workaround by creating a mode/routine where the entire phone is set to silent during camera use. 

a fucking pain in the ass again to do something that should have just been a single button option in the camera settings. not to mention no other camera app is compatible even if you completely remove the current camera through an adb editor.