Apple beat Google to the punch with an Android-to-iOS guide, but Google has now restored the balance.
Google has never been one to shy away from the smartphone wars. Or, to be more specific, the platform wars. And it has never been a big fan of rival Apple beating it to the punch.
However, it has taken Google a bit more time to officially reveal its rebuttal to Apple’s recently launched guide for moving from Android to iOS. Google’s take arrives as its own polished website on Android.com, which is a slightly prettier presentation than Apple’s simple support page article.
On the site, Google details the four key areas where people are likely to want to know how to have as similar experience on Android as they did on iOS: photos and music, contacts, email, and the process by which one finds and downloads apps.
Google highlights the ways in which one can use the iOS verison of the Google+ app to transfer pictures to the cloud. And, in doing so, you can then pull them up on your brand-new Android smartphone or tablet (which isn’t quite the same as transferring the actual .JPG files from an iPhone to an Android smartphone, but it’s certainly one way to do it). Google also suggests a similar cloud treatment for one’s iTunes library—this time, suggesting that iOS users send up to 20,000 songs over to their Google Play library in order to access them on Android going forward.
Sensing a theme?
Syncing iCloud contacts to Gmail is a bit trickier, but basically just requires an export of contacts from iCloud as a vCard file and importing them into Gmail in a similar fashion. Setting up access to an iCloud account, or other email providers, is a fairly painless process on Android. And, of course, Google Play almost needs no explanation for those who are otherwise used to using something like Apple’s App Store to grab new apps.
On the flip side, Apple basically highlights the same areas for those moving from Android to iOS. Only, it also tosses in a little section about Books and PDFs into the mix, for those who like to do a lot of reading on their particular devices.
Previously, Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt took to Google+ with a more informal guide for moving from iOS to Android. We somehow doubt you’d see the same kind of treatment from, say, Tim Cook.