Apple is playing with the idea of opening access to the data you might have in its walled gardens and seems to understand that not everyone wants to stay on an iPhone. The company recently published a new compliance report indicating how it intends to meet the regulations set by the European Union’s (EU) Digital Market Act (DMA). The report indicates that the firm wants to make it more “user-friendly” to switch from iPhone to a non-Apple phone.
Apple doesn’t get into too many details, but the note on this comes under the “user data portability tools for App Store account data” section of the report. The company indicates that while third-party solutions for switching from iPhones already exist, it wants to build on those options with a new solution available by the fall of 2025:
“Third parties offer migration solutions that help users transfer data between devices with different operating systems. To build on those options, Apple is developing a solution that helps mobile operating system providers develop more user-friendly solutions to transfer data from an iPhone to a non-Apple phone. Apple aims to make this solution available by fall 2025.”
This solution would also come along with a new way to carry over the data you might have stored on a browser on your device. It’s not clear if either new solution will come to devices outside the EU, however, as Apple hasn’t yet delivered the alternate app store ability on iOS 17.4 that was required by the DMA outside the EU.
As Apple indicates, there are already some ways that you can switch from iPhone to Android in a few steps. You can use Google’s own “Switch to Android” application, but it doesn’t carry over all the data from apps, or your web browser. On the other side of things, Apple has its own “Move to iPhone” app, which helps you switch from Android to iPhone. Apple clearly has some experience building these kinds of apps, so it will be interesting to see what it can develop for folks who are eager to ditch their iPhones.