I do not use an Android phone, is there an easy means to restore one to factory condition? Is there a simple process to save and restore your phone to your PC/Mac similar to how Apple does it?
(my father has an android phone and now I suddenly find myself curious about save/restore and how to find malware on his phone)
Yes - it's very easy to do a factory reset on your phone.
No - There is no 'easy' way to store/restore the entire phone as I believe Apple does.
(I had a miserable day doing this, when my old Pixel started playing up and had to migrate across to a replacement) - and this was best case when I had the two phones next to each other.
Core 'google' stuff seems fine - either all tied to your account (e.g. contacts) or google app data (texts, pictures etc) which can be backed up to cloud, or directly migrated between phones.
What doesn't work is the logins/settings for all the random apps. Some do store on cloud. Some allow manual export/import of settings. Some you're going to have to setup again from scratch.
Back in the day when I did root my phone, TWRP and similar things let you image/restore the whole phone.
Older Mediatek platform phones let you read/write the entire internal flash (eMMC) directly, which is AFAIK the full extent of persistent writable storage.
That is the true "factory reset", as it's how they were first loaded with software in production. I believe the more widely-known and generic Android reset is merely restoring from an internal partition.
If you look at the storage requirements of an app, you can see it's split between "App Size" and "User Data" (along with a cache).
AFAIK there's no way to actually backup/move the user data without rooting. Now I can see why Google might not want to store all that (and why I might not want them to) - but it's somewhat silly not to have any options.
> No - There is no 'easy' way to store/restore the entire phone as I believe Apple does.
I think Android phones with the Google Services Framework installed do provide such a way. Alternatively, if you're using a custom ROM (like GrapheneOS on Pixel devices), you can use Seedvault[0] for full backups of your phone. It basically acts as a drop-in replacement of the backup service provided by Google.
(my father has an android phone and now I suddenly find myself curious about save/restore and how to find malware on his phone)