The apps left on your devices

The switch is a web-account exercise until you remember the app on your phone, the one on your laptop, and the browser extension you installed once. Each holds a signed-in session and some local state, and uninstalling them is the last step rather than an early one.

The reason for the ordering is narrow but real: local state occasionally includes something that exists nowhere else.

Uninstalling is not part of leaving, and it comes last

Removing an app does not cancel a subscription, close an account, or delete server-side data. It removes a client. The account continues exactly as it was, and if you subscribed through a mobile app store the billing continues too — that is managed by the store, not by the app being present.

So uninstalling early achieves nothing except removing your own access to check things. Do it after the account is closed, when there is nothing left to look at.

Check for local state before removing anything

The category worth a look: drafts, unsynced conversations, and anything the app stored locally that never reached the account.

Most of the time there is nothing — these apps are thin clients over a server-side account. But two cases recur. A message typed and never sent, sitting in a text box on a device you have not opened in a month. And a conversation started while offline that never synchronised.

Open each app once, on each device, before you take the final export. Anything you find that matters, copy out by hand. It is not in the export, because the export is a snapshot of the account and this material never reached the account.

Then sign out on every device

Signing out is worth doing separately from uninstalling, and worth doing everywhere.

The reason is the devices you are not holding: a work laptop, a tablet somebody else uses, an old phone in a drawer, a browser on a shared machine. Each has a live session, and a live session is access to your history by anyone who picks up the device.

If the account offers a list of active sessions or devices with an option to sign out everywhere, that is the one action that covers all of them including the ones you forgot. Use it after your final export, since it will also sign out the session you are working in.

Browser extensions get their own pass

Extensions are the most-forgotten client and often the most permissive, because an extension typically holds broad access to pages you visit rather than only to the assistant.

Remove them from every browser and every profile, and check the browser’s own extension list rather than relying on the toolbar — an extension can be installed and hidden. While you are there, this is the same audit as revoking integrations and is worth doing in the same sitting.

Mobile store subscriptions are a separate cancellation

If you subscribed through a mobile app store rather than on the web, the subscription is managed by the store and cancelling it happens in the store’s own subscription settings.

Deleting the app does not cancel it, and cancelling in the account may not either. This is the most common way a charge continues after somebody believes they have finished switching, and the fix is a thirty-second check in the store’s subscriptions list.

Where you subscribed is worth confirming rather than remembering, and it belongs with the rest of the billing check.

What moves

WHAT MOVES — the clients

  · Conversations that reached the account
                    → in the export. Unaffected by
                      uninstalling.

  · Unsent drafts and unsynced local
    conversations
                    → STAYS BEHIND. Never reached the
                      account, so never in the export.

  · Signed-in sessions on devices you no
    longer use
                    → STAYS BEHIND, live, until you sign
                      out everywhere.

  · Browser extension access
                    → STAYS BEHIND until removed per
                      browser and per profile.

  · A store-managed subscription
                    → STAYS BEHIND, still billing, after
                      the app is deleted.

  · Uninstalling before checking local
    state
                    → IRREVERSIBLE for anything stored
                      only on that device.

The order, on one line

Open each client and check for local state. Take the final export. Verify it. Sign out everywhere. Cancel — in the right place, which may be a store. Then uninstall.

That puts every irreversible action after every reading action, which is the same principle as the rest of the switch applied to the parts that live on your own hardware.

Do the same thing on the new side, once

While you are installing the new assistant’s clients, install them deliberately: the ones you will use, on the devices you use, with the permissions read rather than accepted.

The extension you install now is the extension you will be hunting for in two years, and the device you sign into once is a live session you will forget. Keeping a short note of where you are signed in makes the next version of this an afternoon instead of an archaeology exercise.

What is genuinely lost

The drafts you never look for. Most people do not open the app on the old tablet, and whatever was typed there goes with the device rather than with the switch — quietly, and without ever being missed.

That is an acceptable loss, and it is worth naming only because it is the one category the export genuinely cannot cover. An export copies an account. Anything that never made it to the account was never in scope, and no amount of verification would have shown it missing.