Mac Migration for Mobile Developers - My Experience

Introduction

If you are a mobile developer, you are probably reading this article because you are wondering how good is the Mac Migration Assistant for migrating your development environment between two Macs. Let me share my experience with you.

My Experience

I recently had to migrate my development environment from my old M1 Mac Mini to Macbook Pro, and I decided to use the Mac Migration Assistant. I was not sure what to expect, especially when it comes to mobile development tools like Android Studio, Xcode, and Flutter. I was wondering if the Migration Assistant would be able to transfer all my settings, tools and files scattered all over the place, and if I would have to set everything up again. To my surprise the Migration Assistant did a really great job. Everything was transferred, including:

• All the IDEs installed through the JetBrains Toolbox, including Android Studio, WebStorm, and DataGrip.
• All the Flutter SDKs versions installed through the Flutter Version Manager (FVM).
• Even the symlinks and .zshrc were preserved

So it was almost like doing a full disk clone. But almost is the key word here. Particularly the XCode simulators were not transferred, so I had to download them again, and I also had to re-enable XCode plugins permission, but it was not a big deal. So in the end, I was able to continue my work without any major issues in just 1.5 hours including the time it took migration to complete.

When it’s better to set up everything from scratch

While the Migration Assistant worked well for me, there is one case where it might be better to set up everything from scratch - when you are migrating from Intel Mac to Apple Silicon Mac. In this case if you use Mac Migration Assistant, you will end up with a lot of Intel-based applications that will run under Rosetta 2 emulation layer. So in my opinion in that case it is better to set up everything from scratch to make sure that you are using Apple Silicon binaries everywhere to avoid performance penalty that comes with Rosetta 2 emulation.

Conclusion

In conclusion, if you are a mobile developer, and you are migrating your development environment between two Macs, I highly recommend using the Mac Migration Assistant. It worked great for me and saved me a lot of time. However, if you are migrating from Intel Mac to Apple Silicon Mac, it might be better to set up everything from scratch to avoid performance issues. Overall, I am very satisfied with the Mac Migration Assistant and I will definitely use it again in the future.