Not everyone buys a new phone every year or reviews as many handsets as we do. Especially when you have to log back into the legions of apps you just installed on your new device.

But thanks to Google's new Android developer tool, Restore Credentials, this annoying task is about to get easier for the 40% of us who buy a new phone every year. The tool, which app developers can implement, maintains a login to an app when migrating it to a new phone.

Some apps already had this feature built in, but Google is trying to make it more universal. It works by creating a “restore key” that is transferred to the new device and logs you back into the app. According to Google, this key is related to Android's backup and restore mechanism.

The restore key is a public key that uses the passkey infrastructure to move login credentials. According to Google, restore keys can be backed up to the cloud, but developers can opt out of this. Direct transfer from phone to phone would be more or less thorough, depending on whether app developers opt for cloud backup. [Google Developer Relations Engineer Neelansh Sahai wrote on the Android Developer Blog, “This will ease the transition to new devices and foster loyalty and long-term relationships.”

Google notes that uninstalling and reinstalling an app “removes the associated restore credentials.”

This is new for Android compared to the best iPhones, where account and app credentials are seamlessly transferred to the latest iOS devices; for Android owners, the transfer has not always been easy, but Samsung's Smart Switch app and now built-in apps like the Google Pixel's QR code method have improved it.

New credentialing tools should make switching Android phones more akin to upgrading an iPhone.