While a lot of people go all-in on the Apple or Windows/Android ecosystem, there are also those who spend their time with some devices made by a variety of companies—which can lead to scenarios like having to access Apple apps and services on Android.
Getting to your Apple stuff from a phone running Google’s mobile operating system has actually gotten easier over recent years, but there’s still certainly room for improvement. And to be clear, we’re not talking about switching all of your data and files over from Apple’s ecosystem to Android and then leaving Apple behind—we’re talking about getting at emails, movies, files and more through Android, while also using Apple hardware, too.
Emails, contacts, calendars
Through the magic of IMAP you can access your Apple iCloud emails through the Gmail app for Android: From the main email tab, tap your account profile picture (top right), then choose Add another account and follow the instructions. Messages from different accounts are kept separate, with their own settings for notifications. (You can switch accounts by tapping your account profile picture again.)
Unfortunately, it’s not quite so simple for contacts and calendar information: You can transfer this data over from iOS and iCloud to Google if you’re abandoning your Apple devices, but you can’t set up a two-way sync and keep the channels open, as you can with the emails hitting your Apple inbox.
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Even opening up iCloud on the web in your Android web browser is no help here (see below for more on this), because the Contacts and Calendar components of the iCloud web portal—which can be viewed and interacted with perfectly well inside a desktop browser—don’t appear when you’re using a mobile browser.
You will find various apps on the Google Play Store for getting your Apple contacts and calendars on to Android, but in my experience they’re not particularly reliable—and you’re also then having to trust your Apple login credentials to a third party. First-party apps from Apple would be ideal, but they could be a long time coming.
iCloud files, photos, and videos
Without an official iCloud app for Android, there’s no easy way to get anything from your iCloud Drive or Apple Photos apps up on an Android device. The less-than-ideal option is to head to iCloud on the web in your Android web browser of choice, and then log in with your Apple credentials, to get access to apps such as iCloud Drive, Photos, Mail, Notes, Find My, and Reminders (but not Contacts or Calendar).
iCloud running through a mobile browser isn’t actually as bad as you might think, but obviously it’s not as good as a dedicated, native mobile app. Just about everything you can do in a desktop web browser with iCloud works in Android as well—so you can view and download photos and videos, for example, but you don’t get editing features or anything like that.
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It’s the same for the iCloud Drive part of the web portal: Files can be viewed, shared, deleted, moved, duplicated, and renamed with just a few taps on the screen. You can also upload files to the iCloud and Photos apps too, though there’s no way to sync images and videos you take on your Android device straight to iCloud.
The other extras you get with iCloud on the web are here too, including Hide My Email and HomeKit Secure Video. Open up the Find My app, meanwhile, to see your Apple devices on a map—potentially very handy if you’ve lost access to them but do have access to an Android device (Apple Maps on the web, by the way, doesn’t work on mobile browsers yet, so you’re out of luck there).
Streaming and entertainment
Getting Apple Music on Android devices couldn’t be much simpler: You simply install Apple Music for Android, one of the few mobile apps Apple actually develops for the Google platform (alongside apps for detecting AirTags that don’t belong to you) and switching from Android over to iOS. Apple Music for Android isn’t as polished as the iOS equivalent, but it does the job.
Sadly, there’s no Apple TV app for Android phones and tablets yet. If you want to get access to Apple TV+ and anything you might have purchased from the Apple entertainment library on an Android device, you need to head to Apple TV on the web in your Android web browser, and log in using your Apple credentials.
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Again, it’s not the slickest of experiences, but it’s okay. You can stream anything you want to watch right in your Android browser, and switch to full-screen mode if you need to. All of your watching is synced across devices, so you can start watching something on your Mac and then finish it on an Android smartphone if you need to.
Web access is the way to go for Apple Podcasts too: Just open up the Apple Podcasts web portal and you can carry on listening from where you left off, see new episodes, subscribe to new podcasts and more. There’s also a web player for Apple Music as well, which you can access from Android devices if you don’t want to install the app.
