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GamesHow-To

Moving Android game data from an old phone to a new

Google Play GamesI don’t play much with my wife’s phone. However when her HTC 10’s glass shattered while sitting still on a table, I was called in for moving to a new Samsung Galaxy S9+.

One of the things we had on her phone was My Talking Angela, and that’s used to take bored kids at a restaurant and turn them off for a couple of minutes minutes when we’re done saying we don’t know when the food will be out.

Nah, usually it’s just used to entertain a bored kid, I’m just projecting today.

The new phone was set up, Facebook installed, games transferred back over, but I found several of the kid games we have sitting there did not have progress saved.

Turns out that most, if not all, of her games would function in cloud save mode with Google Play Games. Realizing it was not installed on the shattered HTC 10, I installed Google Play Games, went in to a couple of the games on the old phone, set them to use Play Games, progress suddenly saved to the cloud. Only a few cuts on my finger from that busted HTC 10.

Most games on the new phone just picked up the save games, the My Talking Angela I had to uninstall, reinstall, connect to Play Games, restore saved game, that got the level 36 kitten to the new phone. Not sure why it didn’t detect Play Games, but it didn’t.

So good thing to check before letting your phone explode is whether Google Play Games is on it and your games are syncing to the cloud, and if it isn’t, install and make sure your games are working with it. A kid’s level 36 Angela could be riding on it.

Most likely will not work for all games, but will save you in most.

Paul King

Paul King lives in Nashville Tennessee with his wife, two daughters and cats. He writes for Pocketables, theITBaby, and is an IT consultant along with doing tech support for a film production company.