How to keep your text messages when you switch phones

Switching phones is the single most common moment people lose message history, and almost always because of one assumption: that the transfer covered it.

Usually it does. Here is when it does not, and what to do about it before the old phone is wiped.

iPhone to iPhone

This case is well handled. Quick Start (holding the new phone near the old one during setup) or restoring from an iCloud or Finder backup will bring your messages across.

Two things to check first:

• If you use Messages in iCloud, make sure the old phone has finished syncing before you wipe it. Settings › your name › iCloud › Messages, and give it time on Wi-Fi.
• If you do not use Messages in iCloud, your messages travel inside the backup, so make sure the backup is recent. An iCloud backup that failed three weeks ago because storage was full is the classic way to lose three weeks.

Do not wipe the old phone until you have opened the new one and read an old conversation on it. Not until the transfer says it finished. Until you have actually looked.

iPhone to Android

This is where history gets lost, and there is no clean fix.

Google’s Switch to Android app and the transfer tools built into Samsung and Pixel phones will move SMS and MMS messages. iMessages are a different matter. They are Apple’s own protocol, and the blue-bubble conversations do not transfer into Android’s messaging app in any complete way. Tools that claim to do it typically move the text and drop attachments, reactions and threading.

You also need to deregister iMessage, or messages sent to your number from iPhone users will keep going into iMessage and never reach your Android phone. Apple has a deregistration page for when you no longer have the iPhone.

Practically: if you are leaving iOS and there are conversations you care about, export them while you still have the iPhone and a Mac. After the switch it is much harder, and after the phone is wiped it is usually impossible.

Android to iPhone

Apple’s Move to iOS app transfers SMS and MMS. WhatsApp has its own official transfer path. Other messaging apps vary, and most need their own in-app backup turned on before the switch.

The step to take before any switch

Whatever direction you are going, do this while you still have the old phone working:

1. Make a local backup. Connect the phone to a computer and back it up locally, not just to the cloud. On a Mac: open Finder, select the device, Back Up Now. This is a file on your own disk that does not depend on a subscription, an account, or the phone continuing to exist.
2. Export the conversations you actually care about. Not all of them. The ones you would be upset to lose: a parent, a partner, a friend who died, the thread where something important was agreed.
3. Copy that export somewhere else. An external disk, another computer, cloud storage of your choosing. One copy is not a copy.

Step two is the one people skip, and it is the only one that survives the phone being wiped, the account being closed, and the platform being left.

Why a backup alone is not enough here

A backup restores a device. That is its job and it does it well. But you cannot open a backup and read a conversation: it is a folder of files with hashed names, and its only supported use is being restored onto a phone.

So if you switch to Android, your old iPhone backup still technically contains your iMessages, and you still cannot read them without an iPhone to restore it onto. Ten years from now that is a real problem.

An export is different. It is a readable folder that opens in a browser on any operating system, with the attachments in it at original quality. It does not care what phone you own.

If you have already switched and wiped

Check, in this order:

1. An old local backup on your computer. Look in ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup on a Mac. People forget these exist, and they are readable with an export tool that supports device backups. If you find one, you may be fine.
2. Messages in iCloud with the old Apple ID. If the account is still yours and sync was on, signing in on a Mac may bring the history back down.
3. The other person. Unglamorous, but if the conversation matters, they may still have their side of it, and a screenshot of their thread is better than nothing.

If none of those work, the history is likely gone. Which is the argument for doing this before the switch rather than after it.

How to export an iMessage conversation on a Mac covers how, including exporting from a device backup.