What you need to grasp when switching from Android to iPhone

  If you've decided to switch your smartphone from one running Android to an iPhone, you're making a great choice. But if you've been using Android long enough to accumulate a decent number of apps and a good-sized music library, to say nothing of videos, contacts, and calendars, you may have questions about what you can bring to your new phone. Luckily, the answer is that you can bring most of your content and data, with a few notable exceptions. Once you know which model you're going to buy, read on to learn what you'll be able to move to your new iPhone.

  One of the most important things you'll need on your computer for using your iPhone is iTunes. It's possible that you've been using iTunes to manage your music, podcasts, and movies, but many Android users use other software. When you switch to iPhone, iTunes isn't optional: iTunes is how you control what content—including contacts, calendars, and apps—gets synced to your phone. ITunes is free from Apple, so you'll just need to download and install it.

  Depending on how you've used your Android phone, you may have downloaded a lot of content, especially music, directly to it. It's crucial that, before you switch to iPhone, you sync all of that music to your computer. If the music is on your computer as well as your phone, the likelihood that you can move it to your new iPhone is much higher (more on that in a minute). But if your music only lives on your Android phone, there's a good chance you'll lose all those downloads when you switch. If you get your music through a streaming service like Spotify, you won't have to worry about losing music (though any songs you saved for offline listening will have to be re-downloaded on your iPhone). Just download the iPhone apps for those services and sign into your account. In fact, you want to make sure that everything on your Android phone is synced to your computer before you switch to iPhone—not just your music, but also calendars, address books, videos, etc. If you use a web-based calendar or address book, this probably isn't necessary, but better safe than sorry. Sync as much data to your computer as you can before starting your switch.

  Probably the most important part of moving from one smartphone platform to the other is to make sure that all of your data comes with you when you change. Here's some guidance on what data can and can't transfer, and how to do it. The other thing that's most important to many people is their photos. You definitely don't want to lose hundreds or thousands of priceless memories just because you changed phones. This, again, is where syncing the content of your phone to your computer is key. If you sync the photos from your Android phone to a photo management program on your computer, you should be able to move it to your new iPhone. If you've got a Mac, just sync the photos to iPhoto (or copy them to your computer and then import them to iPhoto) and you'll be fine. On Windows, there are a number of photo-management programs available. It's best to look for one that advertises itself as being able to sync with the iPhone or iTunes.

  Here's a big difference between the two types of phones: Android apps do not work on the iPhone (and vice versa). So, any apps you've got on Android can't come with you when you move to iPhone. Luckily, many Android apps have iPhone versions or replacements that do basically the same thing. Even if there are iPhone versions of the apps you need, your app data may not come with them. If the app requires that you create an account or otherwise stores your data in the cloud, you should be able to download the data to your iPhone, but some apps store your data on your phone. You may lose that data, so check with the developer of the app.

  Now that you know the ins and outs of transferring your data from your Android phone to your new iPhone, it's time to get started setting up and using your iPhone. The switchover process is relatively painless once you decide to switch to an iPhone. If you have enough budget, then you can have whatever model you like and basically the newest model will be advanced, but if you have a low budget, then you can get a refurbished unlocked iPhone of an older model. And a lot people will still want to keep the numerable and may concern about the compatibility of the network, then you can just go to the carriers and they will handle the problem for you or you can just buy an unlocked refurbished iPhone.