Transfer Candy Crush from one Android phone to another

If you have been playing Candy Crush Saga on your Android phone without connecting your game to Facebook then you might be disappointed to discover that there is no easy way to move to a new phone without losing your progress. However, it can be done without resorting to the creation of  a Facebook account. Note that you can also use this method to save your progress if you are wiping your phone.

Your phones do not need to be rooted, but if they are you might want to install Superuser by ClockwordMod as I had problems with a different Superuser app.

1. Install the free Helium by ClockworkMod app on both old and new phones.

2. Start Helium app on old phone. If your phone is rooted then skip to step 7.

3. On your computer install Helium Desktop.

4. Connect phone to PC via USB.

5. Run Helium Desktop. This will connect to the phone and try to initialise the Helium app. If this succeeds you will see a satisfying green tick. 

Problems here may indicate a driver issue. In the Windows Device Manager you should see your Android device listed as shown below. If it has a yellow exclamation mark you need to install the correct driver. 

6. Disconnect USB cable.

7. In Helium app menu choose PC Download. This should display the Helium Server screen, with a big green power button. Note the URL displayed.

8. Use a web browser on your PC to access the URL listed in the app.

9. On the web page make sure Backup App Data Only is not ticked. Choose Candy Crush Saga, then Start Backup. This will save a zip archive containing the Candy Crush data and application to your PC.

10. You've finished with the first phone, so exit the Helium app.

11. Follow steps 2 to 8 again, but with your new phone.  

12. On the web page choose Restore, and point it to the zip archive you saved earlier.

13. Candy Crush should now be playable on your new phone. 

Helium can do much more than the simple procedure detailed in this post. It can backup to Cloud services, directly from one Android device to another, and even do automatic scheduled backups.

If you have problems look in the Helium Support Wiki. Note that the Helium documentation states that it does not work with Motorola devices, but I had no trouble with my Moto G.