Motorola Mobility updates Android data migration app with ability to address iPhone data.

A friend should help you progress, but a real friend should help you progress a body, or so it’s said.

This witticism might describe the client relationship sought by companies like Motorola Mobility with products like Motorola Migrate, its migration assistance technology. For the sake of your friendship and future patronage, Motorola can help you you progress the corpus of your data from whatever Android or iOS smartphone has fallen from favor.

On Tuesday, the Google-owned company updated Motorola Migrate, an Android app designed to transfer data to at least one of 5 Motorola phone models, having the ability to access Apple iPhone data, through that company’s iCloud service.

“One of the most biggest pains of a brand new phone is forsaking important stuff to your old phone,” Motorola explains in its Google Play listing. “You can now move an important content out of your old on your new phone in exactly about a steps, wirelessly.”

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Motorola Migrate can transfer photos, videos, text history, call history, and SIM contacts to Moto X, Moto G, Droid Maxx, Droid Mini, and Droid Ultra devices. It can’t transfer iOS apps, however.

Motorola is following in a path walked by Google because it tried to convince customers to desert the familiar world of Microsoft Office for its cloud-based Google Apps suite. In 2010, Google introduced Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange, software designed to aid companies shift data from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps. That was shortly after Google debuted Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, to permit Outlook users to hook up with Google Apps as a back end, and Google Apps Migration for Lotus Notes.

Cloud Sherpas, an IT integrator that helps companies move to Google Apps, offers an analogous migration tool for Novell GroupWise customers.

Before Google, it was Apple that championed migrations clear of Microsoft territory, first with its “switchers” campaign in 2002 and subsequently with software resembling its Windows Migration Assistant.

Microsoft, which never really bothered with wooing the small share of non-Windows users in the course of the PC era, in December borrowed a page from the migration playbook to entice Gmail users to interchange to Outlook.com. It now offers a device to go Gmail messages to Outlook.com’s servers. That followed the 2011 debut of software to make it easier for developers to conform iOS apps to Windows Phone.

The marketing of migration has even hit the mobile carrier market, which has sought to restrict customer churn through contractual commitments. T-Mobile recently began promising to pay the early termination fees incurred by customers breaking their mobile contracts with competing carriers to sign up for T-Mobile.

Whatever else could be said about companies that aspire to friendly relations with their customers, folks that earn customer loyalty within the first place wouldn’t have to fret about being abandoned.

Thomas Claburn is editor-at-large for InformationWeek. He was writing about business and technology since 1996, for publications akin to New Architect, PC Computing, InformationWeek, Salon, Wired, and Ziff Davis Smart Business. Before that, he worked in film and tv. He’s the writer of a science fiction novel, Reflecting Fires, and his mobile game Blocfall Free is on the market for iOS, Android, and Kindle Fire.

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