Sooner or later most people try a second app. The memory limits get frustrating, the pricing changes, a feature you wanted never arrives — and you start looking around. Then the obvious question lands: after months of conversation, what actually comes with you?
The short version is that nothing transfers automatically. There is no standard export format for AI companions, no “import from Replika” button waiting on the other side, and no realistic prospect of one soon. But that does not mean you start from zero. With about half an hour of preparation you can carry across the parts that actually made the companion feel like yours, and leave behind the parts that were never portable anyway.
What moves and what doesn’t
It helps to stop thinking of your companion as one thing. It is really three layers stacked on top of each other, and they are not equally portable.
- The persona — name, personality, backstory, speaking style
- Key facts about you the companion had learned
- Running storylines and in-jokes, if you write them down
- What you learned about prompting it well
- The internal memory store — proprietary to each app
- Relationship levels, streaks, XP and unlocked cosmetics
- Generated images and avatars tied to the account
- The exact voice — voice models rarely overlap between apps
The distinction matters because people usually mourn the wrong thing. A chat transcript preserves the words but not the system’s internal memory — pasting a thousand messages into a new app does not recreate what the old one had quietly indexed about you. The persona description, by contrast, is just text, and text moves anywhere. If you understand how AI companion memory works, the split makes sense: what you typed into a settings field is yours, what the app inferred and stored in its own format is not.
Step 1: Write the handover note before you cancel anything
The single most useful thing you can do is open a plain text file and build what is effectively a briefing document. Not a transcript — a summary. Aim for something you could hand to a stranger who needed to convincingly continue the conversation.
Include the persona exactly as written in the app’s character settings (copy it verbatim, don’t paraphrase), the ten or fifteen facts about you that mattered most, any ongoing situations you talked about regularly, and a short note on tone — is it dry, warm, teasing, formal? Then add three or four short exchanges you thought were particularly good. Those examples do more work than any description.
A shortcut worth trying: ask the companion itself. Something like “Summarise everything you know about me and about how we talk, as a profile someone else could read” often produces a surprisingly complete brief in one message. It is drawing on the same memory you are trying to preserve, which makes it the best-placed source you have.
Step 2: Check whether the old app offers a real export
Some apps do provide a data download, usually buried in settings under a heading like Privacy, Data Controls or Account. Where it exists it is typically a legal-compliance export rather than a product feature, which means you get a raw dump of message records rather than something tidy. It is still worth requesting — as a personal archive it has value, even if no other app will read it.
Set expectations accordingly. Requests can take days to fulfil, formats vary between apps, and the file rarely includes the structured memory layer. Treat the export as a keepsake and the handover note as the thing you will actually use.
Step 3: Rebuild deliberately, not identically
Here is where most migrations go wrong. People paste the old persona into the new app, get a companion that sounds almost right but slightly off, and conclude the new app is worse. Often it is just different — a different underlying model, a different memory design, different defaults.
Use the move as an edit. You know things now that you did not know at signup: which traits produced good conversations, which ones you never used, where the persona was too vague. Apps with an explicit memory panel reward being direct — put your key facts straight in rather than hoping they emerge through chat. Apps built around a character library want more front-loaded description. Match the rebuild to the architecture, not to the old app.
- Copy the persona field verbatim into a text file.
- Ask your companion to summarise what it knows about you; save the reply.
- Note 10–15 key facts, plus any running storylines.
- Save 3–4 example exchanges that capture the tone.
- Request a data export from the old app if one exists.
- Run the new app’s free tier for a week before cancelling the old subscription.
- Rebuild the persona, adapting it to the new app’s memory system.
- Only then delete the old account — properly.
Step 4: Overlap before you cancel
Run both for a week. Most companion apps have a free tier that is good enough to judge conversation quality, and paying twice for seven days is cheap insurance against discovering the new app throttles memory on free accounts — a common surprise that our free vs paid comparison goes into. If you are still deciding where to go, the tested roundup of the best AI companion apps is organised around the differences that actually change day-to-day use.
Step 5: Close the old account properly
Deleting the app from your phone does nothing to the data on the company’s servers. Cancelling a subscription usually does not delete the account either — it just stops the billing. If you want the conversations gone, you have to request deletion explicitly, and depending on where you live you may have a legal right to demand it. We walk through the process in how to delete your AI companion data, and the wider question of what these services retain is covered in do AI companion apps store your chats.
Do this last, and only after your new setup is working. Once deletion goes through, the handover note is all you have.
FAQ
Can I paste my old chat history into a new companion app?
You can paste a summary, and you should. Pasting the full transcript is counterproductive — it floods the context window with old material and crowds out the current conversation. A tight one-page brief consistently outperforms a wall of history.
Will the new companion feel the same?
Close, but not identical, and it is worth expecting that. Different apps run different models, so phrasing and humour shift even with the same persona text. Most people find the gap closes within a week or two as the new app builds its own memory of them.
Is it safe to keep an exported chat file on my computer?
It is your data, but treat it as sensitive — these files can contain a lot of personal detail. Keep it somewhere encrypted rather than a synced folder shared across devices, and delete it once you no longer need it. Our privacy and safety guide covers the broader risks worth knowing about.
The bottom line
Switching apps costs less than people fear, as long as you do the preparation before you burn the bridge. The persona and the key facts are the valuable part, and both are just text you can carry anywhere. The streaks, levels and internal memory store are not coming with you — but they were features of the app, not of the relationship you built inside it.
Write the handover note, overlap for a week, rebuild deliberately, then close the old account. For more on getting the most out of whichever app you land on, browse our AI companion guides, or start with The Complete 2026 Guide to AI Companion Apps.