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Situations · New phone

I lost access after changing phones

The usual surprise: you restore the backup on the new phone, your photos, contacts and apps appear, you open the wallet — and it is empty, asking you to create a new one. That isn’t a bug: it is exactly how it works, and for a good reason.

October 1, 2026 · 4-minute read

Why the wallet doesn’t travel

Wallet apps store your phrase in a protected area of the phone that, in most cases, is not included in backups and is not transferred between devices. That is deliberate: if the phrase travelled with every backup, it would also travel to the cloud and anywhere else that backup ended up.

The consequence: the only bridge between your old phone and the new one is your recovery phrase. That is why every app insists so much that you write it down.

If the old phone still exists

That is the best possible news and it calls for quick action. Switch it on, open the wallet, go to the security settings and write your phrase down on paper. Do it today: those phones fail, batteries swell and apps stop working over time.

If the old phone is gone

  1. Look for the phrase on paper: notebooks, folders, the phone’s box, important documents.
  2. Search emails you sent yourself and your phone notes, including the notes trash.
  3. Check whether you synced notes or screenshots with a computer or the cloud.
  4. Check whether you had the same wallet installed on another device: a tablet, a computer, the phone before last.
That fourth point solves quite a few cases. Many people had the same wallet in two places and only remember one. And if the phrase was in a screenshot, that screenshot may still be in your photo cloud even though the phone is gone.

If you sold or recycled the phone

If you handed it over wiped, nothing remains to recover from it and your only route is the phrase. And if you handed it over unwiped, the priority changes: someone may have access to your wallet. In that case the urgent thing isn’t recovering, it is securing whatever is left.

And if the phrase is written down but incomplete, your case has a good outlook: I’m missing one word of my 12-word phrase.

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