People change phones. They want their programs and data to show up on their new phones. Apple has solved this problem. Somehow, Google has not. As explained here, settings can be synced through Google’s sync API. It is however useless except for Google’s own apps and whoever uses their API (maybe nobody).

But as far as full-system backup and restore options go, you either have to root your system and use Nandroid or Titanium to backup to the phone storage itself, or you have to rely on adb backup. adb is Android Device Bridge, something that is accessed through the Developer Mode on Android. It feels like Google has given up on this feature midway through and just left it flopping around, because it simply does not work. Although I haven’t had trouble getting backup to work (‘adb backup -apk -shared -all -f [file]‘), I could not get restore (‘adb restore [file]‘) to work automatically because of this bug (which incidentally is also obsoleted).

It turns out you need to get into Settings->Apps and kill as many running processes as you can, and then while restore is going on, monitor through adb shell and logcat | grep Backup, and continuously pm disable a number of running processes including com.google.android.googlequicksearchbox, com.google.android.plus, com.google.android.music, or whatever else restore is stuck on. If you’re lucky, the restore process finally “finishes” and half of your apps and data are restored, while the rest are either not installed, or installed as some old OS-default version, including Google’s own apps like Talk, Maps, etc. on account of Google Play services not being restored. Yeah, thanks, Google!