[Discuss] iPhone vs. Android - the backup problem

[Kent Borg]

Shirley Márquez Dúlcey wrote:
> One of the nice things about the Amazon Appstore is that it has a full 
> record of all the apps you have bought including free ones. It would 
> be nice if the Google Play store had the same kind of record. At least 
> then you would have a central place to see what apps you have 
> installed in the past and might want to install again. 

Google does the same thing. (Mostly.)

I recently got a new phone and *most* of my Google Play apps reappeared, 
but not all. Possibly the missing ones were actual side-loaded, the 
missing ones were all pretty obscure, they were possibly buggy or 
ancient in their construction in a way that broke Google's records.

As for settings, Google backed up as much as it could via their cloud. 
It made sense once I thought about it. I now have a phone and a tablet, 
and I don't want everything synced between the two: icons would be 
hopping around and volumes would be changing. I do, however, want things 
like contact lists and calendars to sync. It was pretty smooth. It was 
spooky when both the phone and tablet knew how to get on the wifi at 
work. Settling in to a new phone is still a process.

Individual apps have their own data, some will store it in some cloudy 
server. Here you have to be aware of what data you care about and make 
sure it is backed up somehow.

Unfortunately, there is not a way to backup everything on a stock phone 
to your own server. The DRM aspect makes that impossible in a non-rooted 
phone. Also, like it or not, phones are not stand-alone things anymore. 
Restoring a phone image won't necessarily work if the cloud has a 
different opinion as to your phone's correct condition. The problem has 
shifted: how do you backup your cloud? (How do you identify what is not 
in your cloud and backup it?)

If you want to live cloud-free, or in your own cloud, you don't want an 
Android or Iphone; you need some open-source-y phone that doesn't yet 
exist. Or roll your own from the open-source parts of Android (amazingly 
complete, but very limited apps...).

If you want all the cool stuff that Android and Iphone have, but don't 
want clouds, you are in for a tough fight.


-kb