How To Upgrade your Mobile without the Headaches

The shiny new iPhone has landed, and you might be looking at an upgrade. Trade-in deals make it seem even sweeter, but there’s some things to think about before you make the jump. Here’s some important stuff to know to make the process as smooth as it can be. 

The idea seems pretty simple – you walk into the store, transfer your information and walk out with your shiny new mobile. But it’s often the little things that make it a bit more complicated, and to be wary of when making the switch. 

A lot of your app logins and most importantly, multi-factor authentications (MFA or 2FA) rely on tokens saved in authenticator apps like Microsoft Authenticator or Google Authenticator. Most apps will copy across using the manufacturer’s standard migration, but it’s highly likely those MFA tokens won’t.

MFA tokens are usually fingerprinted to your specific mobile for security reasons. Some apps will allow you to backup these codes to an account  a security risk in itself) allowing you to restore them onto a new mobile, but many won’t. So, if you’ve walked out of the store and your old mobile has been wiped, you will now have to find other ways to recover your account access. And that can be a headache. 

With some apps, especially ones like Microsoft 365, it can be done using another device that’s already signed in (ie your laptop) to change your authentication. For some things you can contact your IT team, explain you’ve changed your mobile and you need your MFA re-enrolled. We often do that for our clients across their suite of apps and it’s relatively straightforward. 

But the tricky things are other apps, like Facebook, which might have allowed you to set up your account with only the MFA token, and no backup option, so you have no alternative method to get back into your account. And, Meta being Meta, there’s no-one you can call, so you can potentially be locked out of your account indefinitely.

So before you swipe into that new phone, make sure you’ve got access to all the things that matter.