Unsuccessful transfer app data to new Huawei Mate SE

Hi All,

First time poster, here. But certainly no stranger to online communities and help forums. They've helped me grind my way through multiple conundrums of all sorts in the past; I'm hoping my experience here will yield positive results as well.

I was recently gifted a Huawei Mate SE smartphone to replace my ailing (not to mention underpowered, when it comes to storage capacity) Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime. Same Android platform, so it seems like that should make things even easier when transferring my apps and data between old phone and new.

However, I seem to have run into a bit of a problem. I've had some success by going into the new phone and using Settings > System > Data Transfer ...and then downloading an app called Phone Clone onto both the new and old phones. With this app, I was able to get all of my old phone's apps onto the new phone.

...BUT the app data (for any of those apps) did not get transferred onto the new Huawei phone, as I'd expected it to. Can anybody please help me sort out why that may have been the case?

Thanks, in advance, for any/all help anyone can offer!

-Steve

Well, I was fairly certain I accepted all terms, permissions, etc., when installing the app onto each phone to first time; but just to be absolutely sure, on both phones I disabled the app, installed it again (being absolutely sure to “Accept” this time), and initiated another transfer from the old Samsung phone to the new Huawei.

To my surprise, among the checkable list of data types to be shared was Apps & App Data… and looking at the details of this category I saw only 2 items: Google Place Services and Samsung Milk Music.

Neither of these are my personal apps, of course. For example, as a birder, one of my apps on the Samsung is the Merlin Bird ID app. This did get transferred across to the new Huawei, but none of my app data came with it (which, in this case, contains a manually installed database of birds from all of North America). So currently I do have the app on my Huawei, but it recognizes 0 birds.

I can easily re-install it on the new phone manually, but this is time-consuming and redundant, and seems to defeat the purpose of an “easy” transfer [between old phone and new].

I just use that one as an example. Other apps, such as Google Maps and Waze had routes, saved destinations, and preferences in them that wouldn’t be recoverable until after I re-navigate those routes all over again.

Frustrating.

Alice,

Thank you for your response. At this point, though, I think I’m willing to consider this a case closed. I’ve tried multiple third-party apps already, including ShareIt; SmartSwitch; and most recently, PhoneClone. Transferring text messages was my biggest concern, and the last app seems to have been successful with that. Otherwise I got photos off the brute force way (i.e. by copying to my computer); and the rest of the apps can either be reloaded (e.g. bird ID packs/databases) or I decided I just don’t care enough about (e.g. game apps w/high scores) to be bothered wasting any more time searching for a solution. Regardless, I thank you again for your response and your advice.

-Steve