If you upgrade your phone a lot, switching between carriers, manufacturers and platforms (being a mobile enthusiast if you’re reading PhoneDog, I’m guessing you do...), you’ll know the hassle that transferring your data from your old handset to your new one can be.

If you’ve used your phone for even a year, there’ll be a plethora of photos, call logs, messages and contact details on there that you risk leaving behind. MobileTrans from Wondershare makes it easy to take that data with you.

MobileTrans runs on your Mac or PC and allows you to transfer data between Android, iOS or BlackBerry operating systems, regardless of carrier. If you’re a platform loyalist, Google or Apple both offer services that allow you to sync your data to your new device easily and with very little effort on your part. But if you’re going across platforms, it can be much harder to get to your data unless you’ve only ever used platform-agnostic, third-party services.

That’s where MobileTrans comes in. Simply install it on your Mac or PC, plug in both phones via USB, and select which data you want to move from the source phone to the destination phone. It’s pretty quick to transfer the data (dependent on the types of files you’re moving) and a few minutes later, you’ll have the desired photos, videos, contacts or other items on your new device. You can also selectively transfer data from an iCloud backup to your new iOS or Android device.

I moved a number of photos and videos from my Android device to my iPhone and they all showed up in my Photos app in the correct place (thanks to EXIF data coming over too) and contacts I transferred were brought over with full info. Everything just shows up how and where you'd expect it to. 

The UI is clean and simple, and the app walks you through the process making it easy to understand. Even the more complex steps — like enabling USB Debugging mode on an Android phone to facilitate transfers — are presented in an easily understandable way.

When transferring from phone to phone, both devices must be connected to complete a data transfer — there’s no option to move data to the computer from one phone, then plug in the second phone and download it at a later time — but there is a workaround... MobileTrans also works as a simple backup solution if you want to use it that way (and you can permanently erase your phone’s data if you’re planning on selling or recycling it). Fortunately you can perform a backup and then selectively restore data from that backup to a phone from a new platform later.

Not all data can be moved to and from all phones and all platforms due to compatibility issues. When transferring from Android to Android, you can move everything from messages to apps, but when going between Android and iOS, your options are a bit more limited. Wondershare has a useful grid on its MobileTrans site explaining what is compatible across platforms.

MobileTrans works with the latest Android Lollipop and iOS 8.3 releases, and has been updated with support for the newest phones like the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus and the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge. There’s a comprehensive list of compatible phones on the MobileTrans site that is worth checking out, but you can try the software for free to see if your devices work even if you don’t see them listed. The free version has some limitations, but is enough to see if your device is supported and experience the transfer process first hand. 

You can download MobileTrans for free on PC and Mac and try it out. If you like it, you can purchase a full license to remove all limitations.