Feature request: Support migation from old phone to a new one

[nazar-pc]

I believe it would be nice to have a built-in feature for migration from old phone to a new one.

The ideal workflow I imagine is the following:

1. Have two phones, both with Graphene OS, let's assume the latest stable version
2. Connect them to each other with USB-C cable
3. Select "Migration from an old phone" on the new device during setup process
4. Confirm on the old device
5. Both phones go into "Airplane mode" to avoid messing with data consistency and start streaming data to a new phone
6. After migration is finished successfully, old phone is asking to confirm proceeding with factory reset

I'd expect that in case of matching versions of the OS the only thing I'd have to reconfigure would be biometric and maybe a few other things that are stored in the secure element, everything else including various application credentials would seamlessly move to the new device.

From my understanding the big challenge and the reason most developers do not allow to backup their apps seems to be connected to various possible inconsistencies, but if implemented on OS level it would be possible to prevent most of them.

Seedvault is not a real solution with the number of errors and apps that forbid their backups or do not implement backups properly. I did submit bug reports to all affected apps to their developers, though I don't remember any of them actually fixing things, even those that were Open Source.

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Here is an example of status quo: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/16182-experience-report-of-grapheneos-migration-from-pixel-6-to-pixel-8-seedvault

[thestinger]

The thread you've linked is from before Android 15, where Seedvault now works much better partly due to device-to-device mode being the default. It backs up all apps now. They can still exclude data but can't opt-out of device-to-device backups, only cloud backups, and the regular exclusions have become cloud-only exclusions. They would need to explicit exclude data from device-to-device backups to have it left out of the backups now.

We do plan to implement direct USB backup/restore to avoid needing a storage drive to transfer the files but it will backup/restore exactly what the existing backup system does and there's no viable alternative to that. We can improve how backup/restore works quite a lot since Seedvault isn't very good and can add some extra backup/restore functionality for more system data not covered by it but most is covered.