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  • New User moving from IOS ..best way to move contacts, data etc over

Hi Folks, New user of GOS. I have been using Apple phones for several years because figured they were the less of the two evils, but now I want more control of my data and security. Moved to Linux on my laptop and bought a Pixel 7a and just loaded GOS and have been playing with it some and am pleasantly surprised. I am not sure how to best move data, like contacts etc over to the new phone. I have a gmail account but I dont use it normally and tried the Google One app but was unsuccessful using that. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

I know a person I helped to do just that!

You want your contacts in .vcf format. Look on that weird Apple store, I found an app, it had ads but it was able to export the contacts.

You can use Localsend to transfer all your stuff, or pay the Syncthing for IOS App which probably works better. IOS has some arbitrarily low limit on shared pictures.

No idea about calendar but you may want .ics or something else.

In general, Apple stuff is not well transferrable and that is their fault. Welcome to the bright side!

The hardest change will be passwords. Password managers on Android suck, but Bitwarden or KeepassDX are FOSS so you have that.

For contacts, if you do have a Mac you can easily export all of them as a vCard, and then you can copy it over to your Android either via Android File Transfer (Made by Google) which allows you to transfer files from Mac to Android and vice versa, or you can copy it to a USB stick and insert that into the phone.

You can export a .vcf directly from the native iOS Contacts app. There's two ways that I have tested. For both, you should "select all fields" on export so you get all the data.

Option 1 (easiest)

  1. Go to the lists view. (From the default screen, it is "back".)
  2. Tap and hold the "All iCloud" list until the menu pops up (assuming you have iCloud enabled—there's probably a "local" list if you don't).
  3. Select "Export" to get a .vcf file, which you can then transfer onto your GrapheneOS device.

Option 2 (annoying)

  1. Open the default view, where the contacts are listed.
  2. Using two fingers, swipe down from the first contact all the way to the last contact.
  3. Once all contacts are highlighted, tap and hold any contact until the menu pops up.
  4. Tap share, this also produces a .vcf file.

Thanks folks! I was able to use Option 1 that minxes0v suggested and it worked perfectly.