Moving Your Portfolio to a New Phone Without Losing Anything

The evening you activate a new phone is the worst possible time to discover a gap. You are tired, the old device is already half-boxed, and the fastest recovery route is the thing you are about to erase. Almost every story of losing tracker data starts there, and almost none of them are actually about data loss.

Get the order right and the whole thing takes twenty minutes with nothing at risk.

What actually travels with your account?

The distinction that explains everything is ownership. Some things belong to your account and are stored against your sign-in. Others belong to the handset because the operating system controls them.

Account-side: your read-only exchange connections, your watched wallet addresses, your manual positions, your watchlists, your alert rules, and your display currency and language preference. Sign in on a new device and this is what appears, because it was never on the old phone in the first place. It was on a server, keyed to you.

Exchange connections deserve a specific note, because people worry about them unnecessarily. An API key lives at the exchange and is used by the tracker's servers to query your balances. Your phone is not part of that path at all. Replacing the handset has no effect on a key, which is why a properly configured connection simply resumes on the new device with no action from you. Read-only API keys covers where that credential actually sits.

Device-side: widget placement and configuration on the home screen, notification permission, background refresh permission, and the biometric app lock. That last one is tied to the face or fingerprint enrolled on a specific device, deliberately. A lock that followed your account onto a stranger's handset would be a security failure rather than a convenience. App lock and biometrics covers setting it up again, and it is worth doing on day one rather than "later".

The practical consequence is that the numbers arrive instantly and the habits do not. Your portfolio is correct in ninety seconds. The widget you glance at without thinking, the alerts that pinged you, the lock you expect on opening: those are a separate ten minutes.

What is most likely to go missing?

Manual positions, by a wide margin, and for a structural reason.

Every other holding in your portfolio has an authoritative source elsewhere. An exchange balance can be resynced from the exchange. A wallet balance can be reread from the chain. A manual position has no such backup. It exists because you typed a quantity and an acquisition price, and if it disappears there is nowhere to fetch it from except your own memory of a trade you made in 2022. Adding a manual position covers entering them; the point here is that they are the only part of your portfolio that is genuinely irreplaceable.

The second most common loss is not a loss at all. Somebody signs in on the new phone with Apple or Google when they originally used an email address, lands in a brand new empty account, and concludes their data is gone. It is not gone. It is attached to the other sign-in method. Before you migrate, check which method you used and write it down, because a fresh install offers you all of them with equal prominence and no memory of your choice.

Third is the subscription. Pro and Pro+ are billed through the App Store or Google Play, so within one platform the entitlement follows your store account and Restore Purchases reattaches it. Across platforms it does not, because Apple and Google do not share billing. Moving from iPhone to Android means cancelling on one side and resubscribing on the other at the current terms, which are $8.99 a month for Pro and $14.99 a month or $174.99 a year for Pro+.

Why must I restore before wiping the old phone?

Because the old phone is your recovery path, and every problem you might hit is trivially solvable while it still works.

The one that ends badly is two-factor authentication. If your authenticator app lives only on the old handset and you wipe it before migrating, you lose the ability to sign in to your exchanges. Not just the tracker: the exchanges themselves. Which means you cannot regenerate a key, cannot check a balance, cannot fix a broken connection, and are now dependent on an identity-verification support process that takes days and sometimes fails. Migrate the authenticator first, save the backup codes each exchange offered you at enrolment, and confirm you can log in on the new device before anything gets erased.

Everything else is smaller and follows the same logic. A connection that fails to reappear is easy to diagnose while you can still see it working somewhere. A total that comes out wrong is easy to compare against a screen you still have.

Work in this order:

1. On the old phone, export your data. Exporting your data covers getting a file you own. Five minutes, and it removes the entire category of worry.
2. Write down your portfolio total to two decimal places, your connection count, and your sign-in method. On paper. This is what you will verify against.
3. Migrate your authenticator and store the backup codes somewhere that is not either phone.
4. Install on the new phone from a bookmark or your store purchase history, not from a fresh store search. A new device is exactly when people install a counterfeit, and fake crypto apps covers why searching is the weak step.
5. Sign in with the same method you wrote down, and let the portfolio populate before touching anything.
6. Compare against your written figures. Matching total and matching connection count means the account-side data arrived intact.
7. Restore purchases if you are on a paid tier.
8. Rebuild the device layer: notification permission, widgets, biometric app lock, background refresh.
9. Reconcile properly rather than trusting the match. Two devices agreeing only proves they agree with each other. Auditing your tracker covers checking each connection against the venue itself.
10. Sign out of the app on the old phone, then factory reset it, then remove it from your Apple or Google account.

Only then does the old handset go to a drawer, a family member or a trade-in counter.

What should I clean up while I am here?

A phone change is the natural moment for the audit nobody schedules.

Open each exchange's API management page and delete every key you cannot name, which after two years is usually two or three. How to revoke an API key covers the order, and the important detail that removing a connection inside an app leaves the key live at the exchange. Remove watched addresses you no longer use. Prune alerts you set for a position you closed, since stale alerts are the fastest route to ignoring the real ones.

Then set the app lock on the new device before you put the phone down, because the version of yourself who does it "tomorrow" reliably does not. The twenty-minute setup is the same checklist run from scratch, and it is worth a read even on a migration, since a fresh device is the cheapest opportunity you will get to fix whatever was untidy about the old one.