[How I Transferred My Timeline To My New Phone] Important: Final Day To Save Your Google Timeline To Your Phone!

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Update, 4/21/26: I finally upgraded my Samsung S23 Ultra to the Samsung S26 Ultra, but realized that my Google Timeline didn’t transfer over and wouldn’t import the data on my new phone.

Since December 2024, your Timeline is only available in Google Maps on your phone.

I finally got it transferred by deleting the Timeline cloud backup on the S23, enabling the cloud backup again on the S23, and then importing the backup once again on the S26. My Timeline instantly remembered everywhere I’ve been to since 2012!

Deleting the old backup on the S23:

Backing it up again on the S23:

Importing the backup again on the S26 from the S23:

Have you been able to transfer Timeline over to your new devices since Google removed web access for Timeline?

Update, 12/8/24: For most people, today is the final day to migrate your Timeline.

I love the Google Timeline. It’s one of my favorite Google services.

I’ve been using it since 2012 and it helps me track the places I’ve gone, with the ability to search where I went by selecting any date date or when I was somewhere by location.

Sure, it’s missing the place I went before then, including the 7th continent of Australia from our 2010 round-the-world trip, but I still love viewing the map of places I’ve been since I started using it.

Share which airports, states, state map, and countries you have visited on DDF.

You can then view a map of that data for a day, month, year, or lifetime of the service, if you’re on a desktop device:

Sadly, the company is killing off the ability to store your data or even view Timeline history on a desktop.

You can download your data to your phone through 12/8, after which point Google will delete it.

Before you switch your timeline to your phone, save the data via Google Takeout. 

In general, it’s good to do a full backup of your Google Takeout data as Google can always decide to block you.

But if you just want your location data, click on Deselect all and then scroll down to Location History (Timeline) and select that for backup:

You can upload that data to various services like GoogleTimelineMapper, though I have yet to find any great options.

After backing up your data, you can open Google Maps on your phone, and click on Your Timeline from the app menu. You will be prompted to switch to Timeline on your device only. You can select to keep your data until you delete it instead of having it auto-deleted every 3 months.

Once you switch, your data will be deleted from Google servers and will only be available on your phone.

Personally, I find the phone interface significantly worse and far less functional than the desktop interface, so this is a sad day indeed. It’s a good reminder not to get too attached to Google’s products, because the company does have a tendency to kill them off. I still miss iGoogle. 😀

Have you found any good replacements for Google Timeline? Which Google products that have been killed off do you miss the most?