It's a phone upgrade year in my household; I'm grabbing the new iPhone 17 Pro, while my wife is upgrading to a Google Pixel 10, and both of our parents are also in the midst of refreshing their hardware. Now, the smartphone market has been saturated for years—everybody who wants to buy a new phone has one already, which means the vast majority of users are migrating their photos, data, apps, and logins across devices. Phone manufacturers and carriers have spent the past few iterations streamlining the process and running their refined playbooks:
Summer and fall phone releases with preorders and review embargos. Hardware trade-in deals, calibrated to nudge users to upgrade. In-person and online store queues. UPS and FedEx delivery surges on release day and through the weekend. Migration assistants from old phones and their outdated operating systems.
After so many annual hardware refreshes, this part of the phone upgrade process is pretty straightforward, and phones are enough of a mature industry and commodity now that stories of launch-related shortages and carrier connection errors are much less common.
But the software side of the equation has not caught up to this cycle, and they tend to work just as poorly for initial setups. Sure, there's usually a surge of app updates when a new operating system drops to capture that "day one" attention, but most apps seem uncaring or unable to migrate cleanly across phones. Most will lose the user session and require relogging into your account. Some require reconfiguration, and many end up re-asking for OS-level permissions.
And it gets really bad when these tasks are chained one after another. For instance, my wife wears a Huawei Band, which relies on the Huawei Health app to manage the connection. But Google removed the app from the Play Store a few years back, and Huawei, in turn, removed the independent APK and requires users to get it through their own AppGallery app store. There were a bunch of Android OS permissions that had to be enabled, accounts created with two-factor auths, and eventually, finally the band could talk to the phone. Previously, I spent about 2 hours setting up Apple Watches for my kids, navigating between parent and child email accounts and Apple IDs, bouncing between multiple hardware devices to complete each step of some 15-step setup process[1].
App UX has quickly devolved into a tragedy of the commons. It's understandable how we got here: each step makes sense in isolation, but string them all together and it's frustrating if not outright confusing—a second factor auth adds a text message here, the OS blocking the app turns into a permissions modal there, an identity verification step means scanning a QR code 3 steps down. There are now even ads and interstitials thrown in for good measure, the latest in techniques to capture mis-taps for eyeballs.
It feels like there's an opportunity here to verticalize the UX for the end user. Identity and verification are important, yes, but much of this is tedious setup and reaffirmation, expressed through piecemeal UI generated by every module along the way. A secure local AI-powered agent—acting on behalf of the user and with knowledge of all the various logins and accounts— ought to be able to automate this away, or at least make it a lot easier for non-technical folks to get through all the setup. Apple & Google, as the OS vendors who have made migrating to upgraded hardware, and given their unique positions in both OS-level toggles and in keeping the trust of their users, are primed to make this happen. Hopefully soon.
It didn't help that they had Apple Watch SEs, which feature underpowered processors and proved flaky in connecting with my phone, even when it was literally inches away. ↩︎