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 my 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.
That’s not crazy and I get it, but it’s not what I want. There are some apps I never launch, but whose alerts I value nonetheless. I have to keep my old phone around and getting alerts for a couple days to see what notifications it gets that my new phone doesn’t, and then manually launch those apps on the new phone. Annoying. Not horrible. But annoying.
Test Flight tests my patience
I’m a developer. I’m friends with other developers. I have a lot of apps that I use from TestFlight, including some that are daily drivers. They show up as holes on my Home Screen on a new phone. I get why. But it’s a pain. I have to relaunch TestFlight, install a whole bunch of apps, and fix my Home Screen’s layout.
New phone day should be nothing but new phone excitement. Instead, it’s kind of a giant pain for a couple hours. Apple should prioritize improving this.