Android reinstall not as easy as can be

In the midst of a very fun evening in New York City the other day, I dropped my Nexus S in a cab and lost it forever. After a bit of research and due consideration, I decided to replace it with an identical model. The upcoming Android phones don’t have anything on the Nexus S that really matters to me and most appear to be bulkier. The iPhone 5 is too far off and the Nexus S is vastly preferable for my needs than the iPhone 4.

So I went to a local Best Buy and got a new Nexus S, booted up and logged into my Google account, expecting almost everything from my old phone had been backed up to the “cloud.” That turned out to be just the case for all my personal data — contacts, email, notes, passwords, stock portfolios, RSS feeds and the like.

But it was decidedly not the case for apps, contrary to what I had expected. Yes, you can re-install any app you’ve previously bought from the Android app market for free onto a new phone. And you can order up the downloads from either the market app on your phone or the Market web site. However, the re-downloads have to be done one at a time and you have to click through the permissions and disclosures screen for each one individually. That’s not nearly as handy as the restore from backup option available for iPhones and iPads in iTunes.

Even worse, the list of installed apps in my account on the market was missing dozens of apps I had previously downloaded on my first phone. Some, like the FiOS home voice mail manager, seem kind of obscure and may be limited in their distribution. But lots of mainstream apps like the super-excellent WordPress (which beats the pants off the iOS version) or Angry Birds or Twitter were also missing. When I searched for them, the amrket did have them listed as “installed” so it clearly had kept an accurate record of my previous downloads.

Definitely an aspect of Android that needs improvement as the platform ages and more and more people face the need to transfer their apps from an old phone to a new one.

I’ve also just finished the exercise of changing dozens of passwords for all the web services and apps I use that were signed in on the old phone. Phew.

For Nexus S the Sequel, I’m investigating some better backup apps and remote find and wipe programs. I’ve already installed the useful “contact owner” app which shows my name and contact info (and the phrase “Reward for safe return”) on my login screen.