For whatever reason, many games seem to actively work against sync across devices. Here’s a guide for James Bond: World of Espionage, but the concepts work for any game. This does not require rooting your phone or invalidating security in any way.
Summary
- Put old phone into developer mode
- Open a terminal window on a PC.
- adb backup com.glu.espionage
- Install Bond on new phone. Don’t start yet.
- Put new phone into developer mode
- adb restore backup.ab
- Copy internal storage data (transfers chat history)
- Start the game, and you should be done.
Of course that’s not simple, unless you are or know an Android developer. Here are the details:
Putting phones in developer mode
Go to Settings > About > Software and poke around until you see a “Build Number” row. Tap repeatedly until it says you are a developer. Then back out to the main settings list and find the new entry, “Developer Options”. Turn on Developer Options, and then turn on USB Debugging.
Open a terminal
On windows, search for cmd.exe and run it. On Mac and Linux, run a Terminal. You’ll see a text interface pop up in a window.
Get android tools
Probably the most complex step here. To run adb, you’ll need the android developer tools. Scroll down to the section titled “Get just the command line tools” and download for your pc. Make a note of where you installed these, and over in your terminal window use the cd command to change to that directory. No easy way for me to describe this part for you.
cd ~/Downloads/androidsdk (an example for mac/linux) cd \Users\myusername\downloads\androidsdk (example for windows)
One way to find the folder would be to search for a file named “adb” or “adb.exe” after you’ve installed. It should be in a directory called platform-tools. Use the cd command to get all the way to where adb is.
Once there, enter
adb devices
and you should hopefully see one or more android phones listed. If not, you may need to follow the steps listed in Google USB Driver to proceed. For simplicity, only connect one device at a time during the rest of this process.
Back up app data
Once you follow the instructions above, and have a working adb showing devices, you can back up Bond’s data. The simplest command to run is
adb backup com.glu.espionage
Once you run this command, you’ll see a prompt on the phone. Hit “Back up my data” to proceed. This creates a file named backup.ab that contains your data.
Restore app data
Disconnect the old phone, and connect the new phone. Restoring is simple, just:
adb restore backup.ab
Copy internal storage data for chats
I think this step is optional, but can be handy so you have a good chat history. Reconnect your old phone. When you plugged in the phone, the computer probably popped up a window you could use to explore the internal storage of your phone. (If not, try Android File Transfer). Browse to Android/data and copy:
com.glu.espionage
to somewhere on your PC. Then connect the new phone and copy back into Android/data
More information
Google is your friend here. Some alternate walkthroughs and solutions I’ve seen include: