Ask Paul: December 1 (Premium)

Happy Friday and, yes, it's already December somehow. Here's another great set of reader questions to kick off the weekend a bit early.

Also, apologies for whatever the heck happened with the "Bad request" error that some were seeing with the Ask Paul forum post this week: The part of the URL that was screwed up is not something I can configure, change, or edit later, so it wasn't anything I did. And a quick bit of research into this issue suggests that it was a WordPress problem. I feel like this has happened before a few times, and I almost engaged our web guys to try and fix it, but we already had 11 questions in, so I was able to close it and just move on and hope it never happens again. I'll keep an eye on the site today to make sure it's not a recurring issue. --Paul
From phone to phone
leoaw asks:

I just made the upgrade from a Pixel 5a to 8 and it was not as seamless as I hoped … Both phones were on the same version of Android and the SIM card was still compatible. Even with that, some of the settings, particularly sound settings, did not transfer over. The odd one was the 8 switched my Messages notification to vibrate instead of the system sound the 5a had even though the sound I use is native to both Pixels. It took me a while to remember where I set the sound at since it's something I only set every 3 years or so.

Given how often you replace phones, do you have a specific process or checklist for transferring your data and settings from one phone to the next?

I don't, and I go about this in a very different way than most people---meaning I almost always do a clean install and then manually install apps, etc.---so I'm not super-experienced with the built-in upgrade capabilities in Android or iOS. I alluded to this in Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max: Transition Blockers and Delays because in that case I had done an upgrade (from an iPhone 13 Pro) and it killed my ability to configure the eSIMs, forcing me to just reset it and do a clean install a few days later.  And then when I moved to the Pixel 8 Pro, I went back to my normal way of doing things.

But I do make this shift about twice each year, sometimes more, and it's time-consuming but usually easy, and it's gotten a bit easier recently. To me, a phone change is about installing and configuring the OS, installing and configuring the apps (and the home screen), and switching over the SIM/eSIM. And the only hard bits, to date, have been switching over my authenticator app accounts, which has always been a tedious, manual process, and, more recently, switching over my eSIM because I'm on T-Mobile and a temporary security measure that requires me to call them to do this rather than just do it myself has dragged on for over a year. I may literally leave this carrier because of this: I need to change eSIMs a lot and this should take minutes, not an hour. (Google Authenticator now supports account sync, which solves most of the authenticator issue; I still use Microsoft A...