Migrating from Pixel 7a to Pixel 11

Setting up a new phone always takes longer than it should, usually with at least one app or account causing grief along the way. This one didn’t, which felt almost suspicious. I’d been using a Pixel 7a for the past couple of years and picked up a Pixel 11 as my next daily driver. The 7a is still a solid phone. No complaints that would have forced an upgrade, and it’s got security updates from Google running through May 2028. But a contract renewal came around with the 11 at no extra monthly cost, plus an offer on Pixel Buds 2 Pro for £1 in a couple of weeks. Hard to turn down. The setup started awkwardly. The Pixel 11 was only connecting to my router’s 2.4GHz WiFi and complaining the connection was too slow to proceed. The fix turned out to be disabling smart networking on the router, properly separating 2.4GHz WiFi from 5GHz WiFi so the phone could connect to the faster one. Ironically, the WiFi connection only needed to be stable long enough to initiate the transfer. Once past that…