I had to get a new phone at the weekend, and in a moment of possibly misplaced confidence I decided this was the time to switch to Android. It wasn’t without its challenges.

The good news is that things have come a long way. Every app I rely on has a sibling or a direct replacement on Android now, which definitely wasn’t true the last time I tried this. I didn’t have to rethink how I do things, and the switch mostly felt like a refresh rather than a reset.

That said, I still lost data. Apple Health doesn’t make it easy to export a full set of your health records in a format you can actually use anywhere else. WhatsApp’s iOS-to-Android transfer failed due to my specific circumstance of not being able to use a cable with the iPhone. Passkeys are still largely stuck inside the Apple ecosystem, with no elegant way to migrate them to something more portable like 1Password or a dedicated passkey manager. I’ll chip away at that bit by bit.

What this reminded me of is something I wrote recently – the idea that if you want to actually own your data, you have to put in the work. Post once, syndicate everywhere sounds great in theory, but if the underlying data is locked inside Apple Health or your phone’s biometric keychain, then you’re not really in control of it.

So I’m starting to be more deliberate. Health data is now also going into a cross-platform app that supports export. I’m being more careful about my password and passkey storage into something not tied to the OS. I’m making sure anything I care about, whether it’s a blog post, a photo, or a note lives somewhere I can get to it without having to beg a proprietary app to let go.

It’s not about ditching Apple or Google entirely. I’ll still use both. But I want to know that when I choose to move, I can. And that when I share something, I still have it.

And just out of morbid curiosity (or for myself at some point in the future) I have tidied up the checklist I wrote for myself and shared it here.