I got a new phone — how do I get my account back

I got a new phone — how do I get my account back

You’ve installed Furbol on a fresh phone — maybe a second device you want to use alongside your old one, maybe a replacement because the old one is gone. You want to know whether your account, bookings, wallet, and friends survive the switch, and what you actually have to do.

Short version: install the app, go through the same signup screen you went through the first time, and type in the same phone number you used before. Furbol recognises it and brings your account back. You don’t create anything new.

What you do on the new phone

The onboarding screen looks identical to the one you saw on day one — Furbol doesn’t have a separate “I already have an account” flow. The same five steps unfurl:

1. Phone number. Type your number. Furbol sends an SMS code. Type it in.
2. Nickname. Your existing nickname is already filled in — the field is populated from your account. You can scroll past.
3. Avatar. Same — your current avatar is already set. Scroll past.
4. Contacts permission. Furbol asks for contacts again (this is a phone permission, and the new phone hasn’t granted it). Grant or skip.
5. Go for the games. Same final button, same destination.

The steps aren’t automatically skipped — they still appear, each one pre-filled from your account. It feels like a replay of the original signup, but your answers are already there and you just scroll through confirming them. It takes under a minute.

What comes with you

Everything that lives on Furbol’s side of the line comes over unchanged:

• Your wallet balance, including anything pending from games you’ve already booked.
• Your trial count or Pass. If you used three trial games on the old phone, you’ve still used three — the counter doesn’t reset. If you had an active Pass, it’s still active for whatever time was left on it.
• Every booking you were in — future games you’re saved for, past games in your history.
• Your connections, followers, blacklists, and claimed pre-registrations.
• Your profile details — nickname, avatar, birthday, gender, nationality, height, preferred roles, social links.
• Your notification preferences (the topic toggles in the account editor) and the privacy settings (public / anonymous, friends-can-manage-bookings, phone-contacts-can-find-me).
• Your hosted games if you’re a host.
• Your language preference. Furbol keeps this tied to your account, not your phone, so the new device opens in the same language (even if the phone’s system language is different).

Nothing you care about is stored only on the old phone.

What doesn’t come with you

A short list of small preferences lives on the phone, not on your account, and resets when you install fresh:

• Your paint-by-metric choice. If you’d set the lens to solidity or age, the new phone starts back on the default (level). See Paint by Metric — it’s explicitly a per-device preference.
• Home-feed filter state. Any filters or sort you had applied come up cleared on the new device — you set them again if you want them.
• Game drafts you hadn’t published yet. A game you were in the middle of creating on the old phone, saved as a draft when you closed the editor, doesn’t come over. The draft lives on the phone that held it.
• Local contact aliases. Nicknames you’d set on contacts that aren’t Furbol users are tied to the device and get cleared.

None of this is damage — these are all things Furbol never needed on the server in the first place, because they’re just about how your phone shows you the app.

Does the old phone get signed out?

No. Installing Furbol on phone B doesn’t kick phone A out. Both devices stay signed in to the same account, and both can use it independently — open the app on either, and you see the same wallet, the same bookings, the same everything. Changes on one device propagate to the other the next time it talks to the server (which is usually within a few seconds).

If you want to stop the old phone from being able to use the account, the clean option is to wipe the old phone — factory reset, or delete the app. That’s what clears the session on that device. Furbol doesn’t have a “sign out all other devices” button in the account editor.

Lost your old phone and the number along with it

If the phone is gone and you’ve lost access to the number itself (e.g., the SIM was in the phone, the carrier gave the number to someone else, you can’t receive SMS on that line anymore), self-service sign-in on a new device is blocked — the SMS code goes to a number you can’t read.

That’s the one case where you need to reach support directly. Open the side menu and tap the WhatsApp link at the bottom — that’s Furbol’s support channel. Have a few details ready to identify yourself: the old phone number, a recent game you booked, your nickname. Account recovery tied to a lost number is a manual process, not an in-app flow.

What the other players see

Nothing changes from anyone else’s side. You’re the same player — same profile, same avatar, same ratings, same follower list. Friends don’t get a notification that you switched phones; there’s no badge or marker on your profile. It’s invisible.

Related

• Signing Up — the step-by-step you’re replaying, only with fields pre-filled.
• The Account Editor — where phone-number changes and logout live.
• Account States — the difference between signing out (reversible) and deleting (not).
• Paint by Metric — an example of the per-device state that doesn’t transfer.
• Phone Contacts — why the contacts permission prompt reappears on the new device.