How to Trade In or Sell Your Android Phone - Lifehacker

The first step is to back up your data—including your contacts, texts, app data, photos, and other files stored on your phone.

The process has pretty much the same steps as in our video guide on backing up personal data on Android (and iOS), so feel free to check that out, as well.

There are a few ways to backup an Android phone, but Android’s built-in backup tool is the simplest; it uploads your data to your Google Drive (or other apps) so you can import it to your new phone later.

Do note that you may not have enough space to back up everything on your phone for free, at least if you’re using Google Drive or Google One Drive.

Everything you back up counts against the free 15 GBs allotted to every Google account, but buying additional space is inexpensive.

Google Photos will automatically back your phone’s images, but the app now counts additional cloud uploads against your Google Account’s storage limit, and photos and videos are likely the biggest chunk of data on your phone.

The next step is to remove your Google Account from the phone.

Make sure you perform this step after backing up your data, since you won’t be able to sync your files to the cloud after removing an account.

With your data backed up and your Google Account unlinked from your phone, you can now perform a factory reset.

For those buying directly from a manufacturer, you can sell back old versions of the company’s phone for credit.

If want to sell for cash rather than store credit, there are plenty of third-party resellers you can use as well, including:.

Whoever you sell or trade your phone to, the last step is to get the phone ready and ship it—unless you’re trading the phone in in-person, in which case you can just walk into the store.