<vent>Nevermind. Words simply cannot express the degree of my frustration, even with expletives.</vent>
OK, here's the background. I've been using Droid Turbo 2's (Nougat) for myself and my husband for a number of years now, replacing them with eBay purchases when my husband loses his phone or the batteries die or something else unrepairable occurs. I have Google backups turned on, but I don't trust them (having once had a new phone overwrite my Google backup with an empty backup, and since then routinely finding that my old apps, once no longer available on Google Play, cannot be restored), nor do I trust ANY sync app where I can't manually control the direction of transfer. I supplement my Google backups with SMS Backup & Restore, apkExtractor, local backup features on my apps, and Beyond Compare - I literally back up everything that Windows can see onto my computer hard drive. I don't use Google Photos, I use an SD card. I don't even have a gmail account, although of necessity I do have a google account.
Moving to a new Droid Turbo 2 is normally a 1.5-day affair, as the Google Play app itself that is initially loaded onto the phone can't install many of my apps until I update it, and I always forget exactly what steps are required to get it updated and restarted; and then it takes forever to get all the apps downloaded and installed, and if I don't just WAIT and make sure they're all downloaded, I just make a confused mess of it (and I sometimes find I've got duplicates of most of them). I've done it enough times now that I pretty much know the drill.
Anyway, the last time we got new Droid Turbo 2 phones was only a year ago, and the batteries (whether in refurbished phones or new old stock) are just not lasting that long any more. So, I figured it was time to update. I decided to try a Samsung Galaxy S20+ 5G. Making the transition on my own phone before committing to switching my husband's phone over.
First off, I hadn't realized I was going to have to set up a Samsung account, and with a DOB more than half a century ago, that required going to the web site on my PC, as the UI on the phone is a complete nonstarter (can you say, "scroll backwards through over 700 calendar screens one f*ing month at a time"???). But OK, I got that done, lived some more of my life, and came back to this a few weeks later. Apparently I entered my google information back at the beginning of the month. So now I answered all of the questions about which Google services and which Samsung services I wanted to enable, and upon seeing next to nothing on my home screen, I checked the Play store and saw that 110+ apps were in the process of being installed. OK, great. But then I went to check later, and actually it's 110+ apps that were not able to be restored. There are 28 apps that are either AT&T apps or google or samsung apps or other stuff that I never had on my old phones that look like they've installed just fine.
I haven't yet put the SIM card in the new phone, in the past I always did my switchover using wifi. I did put a different password on the new phone - that has never been a problem before, either, I always change my password when I get a new phone.
Is this just another case of Play Store needing to update before I can download everything, but Samsung (or a newer Android OS) showing me this differently? Or is there some fundamental incompatibility between my old backups and my new phone? Or what exactly is going on? Is there some other layer of authentication I need to do?
Also, I know this is a stupid question with an answer I don't want to hear, but isn't there some way on this Samsung phone to move the navigation softbuttons up away from the extreme bottom of the screen, so that I can hold the phone without accidentally touching them?
Thanks for any help.