Moved to a new phone.. now what?

[sf23103]

I just moved to a new iPhone, and no longer have the old one. Authenticator app is showing "no tokens". I'm stuck and locked out of one of my apps that requires 2FA. Anything I can do?

[rastreus]

Unfortunately, I don't think that there's anything that can be done since you no longer have the old phone. I have successfully changed phones before by first creating an encrypted backup in iTunes and then restoring from that backup.

Edit: It looks like this exact question has been asked plenty of times already: See #6 👀

[mattrubin]

For security reasons, the tokens are stored only on the device you first set them up on, and are only backed up in encrypted iTunes backups. Unfortunately, this means that some users lose tokens when switching phones.

When setting up 2FA with a website or app, you should have been given recovery codes or some other backup method of accessing your account. Hopefully, you can use this to restore access and set up a new two-factor token.

As for more sustainable solutions: I am looking into possibilities for a backup and restore feature (#6), and in the meantime have filed a bug to better inform users of the current limitations of backups (#145).