I wasn’t a fan for any brand or type, just a fan of the android thinking, until I discovered that actually android doesn’t manage privacy data at all, until recently. At the contrary, the brand are managing them the way they want (mostly samsung). And as you, it was become harder and harder to move from a phone to another when moving out of the proprietary apps.
Apple is a bit better in this terms and warns you when it’s not the case, so my switch to apple. The move was (and still is) irritating, some decision about basic stuff are simply not understandable :
-make a song as ringtone
-connection sharing
-file system is sick, you have no access to song or image or video files. The rest is accessible.
-music app
I would say that most of the rest is brilliant. Bluetooth works but their network stahc over wifi is working very well (airplay/airdrop/airprint especially). And last thing, they are following up their product for 7 years I think, which include sw support and parts (battery swap is the main point). And for the data, it is simple as exfchanging a QR code between 2 phones, you can even apply an Iphone backup on an Ipad and it will work.
I have an Iphone 11 pro that I bought used 2 years ago, with 256gb.
For home stuffs and backup, I have a 5tb disk connected as share on my wifi router, and I back it up very 6 month on another disk that I move to my office. The TP of the nas is respectable, it saturates the Gb ethernet, and I don’t need 24/7 data accessibility, so raid/nas is not needed. I have tested as a geek and sold that once I realized it was too much time consuming for no real gain.
What version of Windows are you using?
The basic thing about phones (both Android and IOS) is that most of the filesystem is not accessible. How much remains accessible has varied over the years, with Android generally allowing a lot more. Rooted devices give you total access but you need to really know what you are doing to make use of that, because IOS in particular uses obscure directory naming to make it non-obvious. Both operating systems are basically unix.
So, most of the data will be stored in “sandboxes”, each one private to the application. You cannot, in general, access this via USB, or even tools running in the phone (e.g. Root Explorer, which isn’t “root” except on a rooted phone).
In some cases one might root a phone to extract data from it but then you cannot write it to another phone (if you need to) unless that is rooted too. And rooted phones cannot run stuff like banking apps, cannot be used for contactless payments, etc (yeah, I know, a long story behind that e.g. cloaked root on Android).
One can do part-copy of config data between phones e.g. you can use Nova Backup to save and restore your desktop layout, and that is damn useful for setting up a new phone because you don’t waste hours re-doing the old app layout from your memory.
Then you go to the app shop and download all the apps you want and their icons will appear in the right places.
IOS does all this better, in general. Both fail if you had some apps which are no longer in the app store.
Yes indeed you can auto upload stuff, to various remote servers (called “cloud” 
). A new android phone will probably try to set you up a Google Drive account, and I think you get something like 15GB. You can pay to get more. There is a good auto backup feature there, which backs up settings after say 2hrs of non use while charging and only if wifi is available. The new phone can restore from this, and depending on the apps it does it pretty well. Some things will fail to transfer e.g. email program account settings. IOS does this better but IME also fails to transfer some settings (because devs stored them in an unapproved place). I disabled photos etc from this backup otherwise it will quickly overflow the 15GB. I have a different thing for those, called SyncMe, which back them up 3am to a directory on my PC, which is really good. Never keep important data only on a phone!
Also don’t use your phone for banking. The verification SMS will be sent to … goess where? Yes, I know, previous threads on that 
Dropbox is OK, and I use the free account. You get a few GB (5?). More here. Some people use DB for hundreds of GB of stuff (and pay lots of $$$ ) I never keep anything on DB which I don’t have elsewhere. I find DB has a better windows interface (I auto backup some PC stuff to DB at 3am) and I have removed Google Drive from all PCs (in any case the phone auto backup to GD is not accessible in any meaningful way; it is usable only to restore to a phone!!). One can also backup to Onedrive (the M$ version of GD) but it is a weird app and I have deleted it from everywhere, but if you want free storage it is better than nothing.
I buy Samsung phones. They are very good, cameras are very good, and for me with much less frustration than Apple. Obviously this is a matter of opinion; some like the “oven ready” simplicity of Apple stuff. Many previous threads of course. They produce better jpegs than Samsung, but if you shoot RAW this is immaterial and you don’t need to Apple “computational photography” gimmicks like the fake background blur. Usually I get ones which can take a flash card although with say a 256GB phone you won’t need that unless storing loads of movies on it. Photos are only 10+ MB each. Also internal storage is much faster. Camera apps tend to be stupid-committee-crippled to not work with external cards for certain data e.g. if you shoot RAW (as I always do) you are likely to find that the RAW file will not be saved on external storage. The phone business is full of this kind of crap… more e.g. here.
5G is irrelevant, 4G is very fast when it works.
I don’t change a phone until it gets totally smashed, or the battery is gone, but they can be repaired – around £150 for a screen or a new battery. If I change mine, I will go for one with an optical zoom; it is pretty useful. There are even some oddball models with a thermal camera, which is really handy for stuff I do. @ultranomad may have one.
Lots of good advice above e.g. backup to a network drive. Never backup anything to “cloud” only because there are generally ways to change somebody’s password just for a laugh and then you lose access. This happens on FB a lot – a stupid vulnerability and FB offer zero help with it. You would also get zero help with DB, etc.
AFAIK on a current IOS phone the only thing accessible via USB is what they call Camera Roll. On Android you can access a lot more and this is really handy.
Privacy is a bit of a false hope with a phone, because it is easy to physically lose it, and every phone can be unlocked – except, allegedly, IOS ones but I find that hard to believe, and anyway plenty of ways to create an encrypted drive on an Android one.
Also always check the “Threads possibly related to this one” below.
If you want a cheap phone then you will have to settle for a basic Android one, or a secondhand IOS one
Peter wrote:
AFAIK on a current IOS phone the only thing accessible via USB is what they call Camera Roll
There are some applications such as iMazing (available for both Mac and Windows) which give you substantial access to the phone without having to jailbreak it. I’ve used iMazing, although not recently, and only in a limited fashion, but I was able to extract lots of data from my phone. Whether this is as much as is available on an Android phone, I have no idea. iExplorer and AnyTrans are apparently other contenders.
I also use Imazing for mainly backup and file operation on img/music, although it can do a lot more.
I used Iexplorer (formerly Iphone Explorer) but the filesystem access was gradually tightened over the years. There is of course Itunes, which was the worst POS I have ever used on a PC (no doubt it runs fine on a Mac) and that is/was required if you want to backup a whole IOS device offline, including apps which are no longer in the app shop. Doesn’t IOS nowadays auto delete such apps? You will certainly lose them if you backup/restore from the “cloud”. @stevelup knew all about this but I think he’s long gone.
My last IOS device is on Ebay Oh no, I lied, I have an Ipad 5 Mini, running Foreflight, and usually displaying a “shut down due to too much sunshine” message
However the OP is clearly not buying an Iphone, because of the cost. There are lots of Android phones which are much cheaper and are really good if you don’t need a great camera, and can insert a micro-SD card.
It is unfortunate that the Android market has been set up so that to get a good camera, you have to buy a larger phone, and some of them are IMHO ridiculous.
Peter wrote:
There is of course Itunes, and that is/was required if you want to backup a whole IOS device offline, including apps which are no longer in the app shop.
https://libimobiledevice.org/ (comes with a command-line tool, not only C library) from what I understand will do the backup using the same protocol than iTunes, so will contain the same data. I think that does not include the apps themselves; they are basically never really removed from the app store’s download space. Only there are removed from search visibility, so any account that hasn’t already downloaded them can’t get them; but an account that has downloaded them once has access to them “forever” probably except if they are removed for copyright infringement / malware / … reasons.
Peter wrote:
I don’t change a phone until it gets totally smashed, or the battery is gone, but they can be repaired – around £150 for a screen or a new battery. If I change mine, I will go for one with an optical zoom; it is pretty useful. There are even some oddball models with a thermal camera, which is really handy for stuff I do. @ultranomad may have one.
Yes, I have a Blackview BV9800 Pro with a thermal camera. It also has a barometric sensor (useful for air navigation) and is ruggedised to MIL-STD-810G standard and IP68/IP69K rated (can even be used for underwater photography). Doesn’t support 5G, though. For a price of 320 USD, it’s a fantastic deal, and it’s the third Blackview phone I bought (two for me, one for my mum).
Regarding phone change, I also keep them as long as possible, and all my phone data are regularly copied to the PC, so no Android-to-Android migration is necessary. I’m a bit of a stickler for paperwork privacy freak, so I never back up anything to the Google account or any other cloud services.
Thanks for all the inputs here.
It’s not the problem for me at the moment that I don’t have backups. I regularly copy the data down to PC.
Currently the problem is, that I don’t succeed to copy the data back from the PC onto the new phone. It starts copying but you can see how it uploads file by file (extremely slow) and then eventually stops altogether. I don’t know what this is, never had it like this. Will have to try with a different PC and see if it would do the job there. In any case, 128 GB is way too small as I can see now, after just restoring 1 year of data, only 30 GB are left. So eventually I will need to bite the bullet and get a 1 TB phone or something like that.
With older phones which had an SD card slot, this was never an issue, even if copying did not work, I simply transferred the data onto a new SD card on the PC and stuck it into the new phone. But all the new ones don’t have SD cards anymore. I think the last ones to have them were the S20 series, the others only rely on internal memory, which is a major bummer in my view.
my main problem is that I do need basically my whole photo archive of the last several yearss available on the phone with me, as I do no longer use PC’s while on travel, only the phone with a 2nd one as backup. So what I will need to do is to massively clean those archives up to make the sizes managable. Currently, there are about 60 k pictures on the Note 8.
I found that with the new “freedom” to have a camera with you all the time, picture archives tend to get out of control in a matter of days. With the cam, copying and organizing pics into meaningful folders was a normal ops but since I have capable phone cams, numbers of pics explode while organizing them becomes next to impossible. Maybe a good wake up call to finally get that task done.
Apart from the memory issues, the 10T Pro is amazing. The cams are a good step forward from my Samsung Note 8 and so is the screen and battery life. Experiencing 5G is also neat, download speed where I live makes a huge difference and also the connection is much better. I have huge problems with the 3 and 4 G connection where I live but 5G works flawlessly and very fast indeed. And all that for a fraction of the price of an S22 or S23.
I had great experiences with Xiaomi from day one: When my wife’s S2 gave out after less than a year, I got her a Redmi 3S from Ali Express, when nobody knew Xiaomi at all. It came with a lovely metal casing and after 12 years still runs fine and gets updated by Xiaomi! She has long since moved up to a Samsung S10Lite which also works flawlessly and has been the best Samsung phone we’ve ever had, but the 3S is still in use while in Bulgaria. My daughter uses a Redmi Note 4 which also works flawlessly since I got it 2nd hand. My former backup phone is a Redmi Note 8 which also worked fine. If it was not for the transfer problems and the fact that almost all my home electronics are Samsung which I can control only via Samsung phones, I think I would move to Xiaomi without any hesitation.
Peter wrote:
What version of Windows are you using?
On that PC Win 10.
Peter wrote:
One can do part-copy of config data between phones e.g. you can use Nova Backup to save and restore your desktop layout, and that is damn useful for setting up a new phone because you don’t waste hours re-doing the old app layout from your memory.Then you go to the app shop and download all the apps you want and their icons will appear in the right places.
With Samsung and Smart Switch, if I remember right, everything came over. I just connected the phones with a cable and let it run for a couple of hours and everything from the old phone was copied to the point where the new phone was totally ready to use. Also most apps did not even require a new log in.
ShareMe from Xiaomi is different. It copies the APK files over and asks you to install them, which means you have to open that possibility (install from unknown sources). It also copies pics and docs from the internal memory but for some reason can not see the SD card on the Samsung, so it does not copy from there.
Peter wrote:
Usually I get ones which can take a flash card although with say a 256GB phone you won’t need that unless storing loads of movies on it.
As I said, that is no longer available on any of the newer phones. Not sure which one was the last which had SD cards but it was either the Note 20 or 21. The S22 and S23 series as well as most of the 20/21 series have no SD cards anymore.
Peter wrote:
Camera apps tend to be stupid-committee-crippled to not work with external cards for certain data e.g. if you shoot RAW (as I always do) you are likely to find that the RAW file will not be saved on external storage.
I used to have all pics saved on the SD cards without any issue. When my Note 4 threw it’s mainboard, I simply took out the card and put it in the replacement phone, done. When I got the Note 8, I crossloaded everything with SmartSwitch, which took everything from the Note 4 and set the Note 8 up so I could take it and use it as the old phone was. That is what I’d expect from newer phones too. I am told that this still works if i would buy a new Samsung and connect it to the Note 8.
Peter wrote:
they can be repaired – around £150 for a screen or a new battery.
If I have time, i usually wait until I go to Bulgaria, where I have a very good phone guy who repairs everything. For some of the older phones I order the replacement parts from Ali Express beforehand, they are dirt cheap there. I now bought a new original Oled display for the Note 8 and a battery there for £60 including postage. I’ll have my guy change it when I am there in July. Which means that I’ll probably stay with the Note 8 and use the 10T pro as backup…
Ultranomad wrote:
Yes, I have a Blackview BV9800 Pro with a thermal camera. It also has a barometric sensor (useful for air navigation) and is ruggedised to MIL-STD-810G standard and IP68/IP69K rated (can even be used for underwater photography). Doesn’t support 5G, though. For a price of 320 USD, it’s a fantastic deal, and it’s the third Blackview phone I bought (two for me, one for my mum).
Wow, looks very attractive. Too bad there doesn’t seem to be a Google-free Android OS for it, like LineageOS or so.
