I got a new iPhone 18 Pro today. My early review: It’s good.
But I am genuinely shocked at how little Apple has improved the new iPhone setup experience in recent years.
I did the thing where you get Apple’s take on a QR code, point one phone’s camera at the other phone’s weird image, and start your transfer. I like that phone to phone transfer the best, but none of the options for setting up a new phone like your old phone are perfect — they just come with different tradeoffs.
What I want to like about the phone-to-phone version is that the new phone should be awfully close to a clone of the old one. And in some ways, it is! But in too many other ways, it’s not.
I have no understanding of which apps stay logged in
I stayed logged into MyFitnessPal and Nest. I was logged out of Ring, Gmail, and Slack. Oura was in a weird state where I’m logged in but need to re-pair my ring from its base. What a pain.
Ivory was in some strange tweener state: It was sort of logged into all my accounts, but some of them wouldn’t show their usernames, and none of them would send notifications. A delete, reinstall, and painful relogin process got things back to normal.
Notifications are a whole thing
Not everyone wants a lot of notifications on their phone. I like them. They don’t all get to buzz, but they get to stack up on my Notification Center. But when you set up a new iPhone, most apps that you’ve granted permission to send notifications to you… don’t, until you open them.
