Signal Messenger Migration Android to iPhone

Supported Migration Paths

see [1]

Android -> Android
iPhone -> iPhone

Problem: Android -> iPhone is not supported. Therefore on 21.06.2020 I chose this path:

Signal@Android -> Plain-SMS@Android -> iMessages@iPhone

Steps

on Android:

• use Signal app to create backup on SD card
• copy backup to PC

on PC

• decrypt backup
  • use signal-back to decrypt the backup
  • example used on Mac: ./signal-back_darwin_amd64 format -f XML -o backup.xml signal-2020-06-20-17-53-30.backup
• Cleanup and fixing
  • In my case multimedia messages where broken after import into Android, therefore (and because of the occupied spaces) I decided to delete them (<mms entries), keeping only plain text messages (<sms entries)
  • As signal uses pseudonymization on the telephone numbers by replacing them by IDs, one needs to search and replace them back :-(
  • Here is a Python Script that supports this job

on Android

• copy the resulting XML file to Android
• use app SMS Backup & Restore to import messages as SMS/MMS
• install Apple's Move to iOS

on iPhone
in order to import messages to the iPhone the migration today is only possible on a reset/empty iPhone.

• I used iTunes on the PC to do backup the iPhone
• reset iPhone to factory default, deleting all data
• setup the iPhone and choose migration from Android phone
• I select only messages/conversations for migration
• afterwards I checked that the messages have been transferred correctly
• in iCloud settings: enabling iMessages Sync and wait until the sync is complete

on Mac

• check that the iMessages now show the Android SMSs
• restore the above created backup to iPhone

on iPhone

• in iCloud settings: enabling iMessages Sync and wait until the sync is complete