Chinese phone brands partner partner for seamless data transfer

When upgrading to a different phone, especially when it is of another brand, it becomes extremely time-consuming as most of the time, you will have to do the heavy lifting by yourself, when it comes to transferring your files including, photos, contacts, settings etc. to your new device.

There are third-party apps that can help do this, however, most of them are limited to only installing apps that you had on your previous phone, without carrying over your user data and different settings.

To alleviate this problem, Chinese manufacturers Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo have partnered to make data transfers between their brands seamless.

In an announcement, Xiaomi’s MIUI, Oppo’s ColorOS and Vivo’s OriginOS (the Chinese version of what we know in the international market as ‘Funtouch OS’) will now play nice with each other and seamlessly carry over your data when you switch between either of the three brands. Even data transfers from third-party apps will also be supported.

“Xiaomi has newly added support for migrating third-party application data from Vivo and OPPO phones, so you don’t have to worry about your chat records when switching phones,” reads a statement from Xiaomi.

While most Android users rely on Google’s backup functionality to transfer their files including photos, videos and contacts to their new smartphone, it is important to note that this service, including the Backup and Restore Tool, Google Drive, Google Contacts, and Google Photos, is not available in China

Because of this, it seems that for the time being, at least, this transfer service between the three brands will be a China-only feature, as Oppo has explained to Android Authority.

This is not the first time the three brands have teamed up to offer a service.

Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, realme, Samsung and a few other brands came together to ensure their local sharing service worked without hitches. As a result, Oppo Share, Mi Share (Xiaomi), vivo Share, Quick Share (Samsung) and other similar services work interchangeably in spite of the phones transferring the data between each other.

Furthermore, Huawei, Oppo, vivo and Xiaomi also teamed up to allow developers to upload their apps to all their stores at the same time since the Google Play Store, just like most other Google services, is not available in China.

While Oppo maintains the data transfer feature is currently exclusive to China, this can always change later down the line as it is a highly convenient feature with the potential to convince people to often switch between brands without the unnecessary hustle of porting your data over to your new smartphone.