The non-existence of Android backup and restore

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).
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