Your Old Phone Is Still Logged In Somewhere: Twenty UK Apps Put to the Drawer Test

Upgrade season has a dirty secret: the old phone rarely leaves the building. It goes in the drawer with a dead battery, a cracked case and a surprising number of live sessions. You meant to sort it out. Then the new handset arrived, the transfer wizard did its thing and the old one became a spare alarm clock.

That is fine until you trade it in, flog it on a marketplace or hand it to a teenager. At 124apps, we have spent enough time poking at account settings to know that deleting an app icon is not the same as ending a session. So we ran a practical drawer test: new phone, old phone, 20 popular UK apps and a notebook full of mildly annoyed observations.

The drawer phone is not a logout button

A phone in a drawer still has a copy of your account. It may have a saved card, a downloaded train ticket, a loyalty barcode, a trusted-device approval and a push notification token. None of those things necessarily disappear because you signed in somewhere else.

Our test was simple. In late October 2026 we set up a new handset and signed into 20 everyday UK apps across banking, loyalty, travel, delivery, streaming, shopping, parking and public services. The old phone stayed on Wi-Fi for 48 hours to see what still arrived, then went into a drawer. Over the next ten days we checked each app’s device or session list, any web dashboard, saved payment details, offline content and whether the old handset could still approve a login.

This was a snapshot, not a permanent verdict. App updates change things, and iOS and Android handle some permissions differently. But the pattern was clear enough to be useful before the next trade-in offer lands.

Banking apps were the grown-ups — mostly

Banking apps were the best of the bunch. Monzo, Starling, Barclays and Lloyds all gave us some way to see or manage devices, even if the wording varied from “devices” to “where you’re logged in” to a security centre buried three taps deep. Revoking the old phone was usually straightforward once we found the right screen.

Mostly. One banking app stopped showing the old handset as an active device but still sent a login approval prompt to it until we removed it as a trusted device. That is the sort of distinction that matters. A session list is not a full security clean-up if the old phone can still act as a key.

Our advice: do not stop at “sign out of all devices”. Look for trusted devices, remembered browsers and two-factor approval settings too.

Loyalty and retail apps: the quiet leftovers

Supermarket and health-and-beauty apps were messier. Tesco Clubcard, Boots and Nectar all let us sign in on the new phone, but the old phone kept showing loyalty barcodes and saved vouchers offline. That is convenient in a shop and slightly unnerving in a drawer.

Only some had a visible device list. In others, the only real fix was to change the password and sign out everywhere, then clear the app data on the old handset. A few treated “sign out” as a local instruction: the app forgot you on that phone, but the account still had a remembered session on the server.

This is the category where people are most likely to shrug and move on. Please do not. A loyalty account may not hold your life savings, but it can hold your address, purchase history and a saved card.

Travel, delivery and the push notification hangover

Trainline, Uber, Deliveroo and Just Eat were a mixed bag. Trainline’s app made it reasonably clear that tickets lived on the device, which is good for a commute and bad for a trade-in. We found an old mobile ticket still sitting in the app after the new phone was signed in. It was not a live session in the scary sense, but it was still personal data.

Uber and Deliveroo were better at showing logged-in devices, but both kept sending promotional pushes to the old phone until we explicitly signed out on that handset or revoked it from the account. Just Eat was similar. The lesson is not that these apps are reckless; it is that “signed in elsewhere” does not always mean “quiet elsewhere”.

Streaming, shopping and the cache you cannot see

Spotify and Netflix both had device lists that were easy enough to manage. That is the good news. The less good news is that downloaded music, films and episodes can stay on the old phone until you clear the app’s storage or reset the device. BBC iPlayer was similar: signing out did not always wipe everything we had downloaded for a train journey.

Amazon, eBay and Vinted all had some form of device or session management, but it was rarely the first thing you would find. Amazon’s was the most complete; eBay’s took a bit of hunting; Vinted’s was the most minimal. In all three, saved addresses and payment details were still visible on the old handset until we removed them or wiped the app.

Parking and public services: the opaque end

RingGo and PayByPhone were the weakest for session visibility in our sample. Both let us sign in on the new phone, but neither made it obvious which devices were still attached. Saved vehicle registrations and card details were still there on the old handset. For a parking app, that is not a catastrophe, but it is exactly the sort of thing you do not want travelling with a phone you sold for £80.

Royal Mail and DVLA were better at the account level, though still not as clear as the banks. The DVLA app leaned on the wider GOV.UK sign-in, which meant changing the password and signing out everywhere did more useful work than hunting inside the app itself.

The trusted-device trap

The most important finding was not about notifications. It was about trust. Several apps treated the old phone as a trusted device for two-factor checks. Signing in on a new phone did not automatically remove that trust. In one case, the old handset could still approve a login days after we had stopped using it.

That is the bit to fix before you sell or recycle. Open the security settings on the new phone, find the old device and remove it properly. If the app has no device list, change the password, sign out everywhere and check your email account too. Your email is the reset key for almost everything else.

A trade-in checklist that takes ten minutes

1. Keep the old phone offline while you sort the accounts. Aeroplane mode is your friend.
2. On the new phone, open each app and look for devices, sessions, trusted devices or security settings.
3. Check the web version too. Some apps hide the useful controls in the browser dashboard.
4. Remove the old handset from two-factor authentication and login approvals.
5. Clear saved cards from wallets, shopping apps and parking apps.
6. Delete downloaded tickets, music, films and vouchers from the old phone.
7. Sign out of your Apple or Google account and turn off activation lock.
8. Factory reset the handset. Do not rely on deleting apps one by one.
9. If you are selling, do the reset in front of the buyer or keep proof for the trade-in service.
10. If you are handing it down, set it up with a fresh account rather than your old one.

What this means for upgrade season

The drawer phone is not harmless. It is a spare key with a cracked screen. The best UK apps let you see devices, revoke them and remove trust without a treasure hunt. The worst leave you changing passwords and hoping.

Before the old handset leaves your possession, spend ten minutes in the security settings of the apps that matter: banking, email, shopping and anything with a saved card. Then wipe the phone properly. The drawer can keep the charger. It does not need your sessions.