For many people, WhatsApp is their most valuable asset on mobile phone. Countless people rely on it for everyday conversation. Yet, these user generated data, can never be properly owned by its user.
Released in 2013, in less than a decade’s time, WhatsApp successfully built a user base of 2 billion people. It is undoubtedly one of the most successful instant messaging tool ever. WhatsApp supported a wide range of OS, it once supported Windows Phone, Symbian and Blackberry (feeling nostalic when listing out these names).
However, for years, the backup and migration tool of WhatsApp failed to meet the expectation of its users.
The conversation on WhatsApp is the created by the user, it should be the assets of its user. But it was very difficult for users to really own the conversation.
There are three points I will discuss here: migrate, backup, export.
Difficult when migrating across different platforms (well, there’s only two)
Cross platform conversation migration service only started this year. It was 9 years after it’s initial release! And at this stage, it is still limited to certain modals of phone. For many users, if they would like to change their Android phone to an iPhone, or vice versa, they have to rely on third party applications to do the migration, and the success rate is not high.
Your backup is not yours
Backup is another problem, WhatsApp is the modern version of letters (even though most of the conversations may not be as valuable as written letters, but there must be some very valuable conversations). There are many court cases that rely on some WhatsApp conversations as proof of evidence. For many people, WhatsApp conversation is the most private asset on their phone.
And WhatsApp restricted the backup to only three methods: on Android, backup to Google Drive, or if you are still lucky enough to have a SD card slot, you can backup to SD card. On iOS, sorry you have to rely on that 5GB backup space on iCloud. (More than 5GB? Pay for more space!)
Why can’t I backup MY conversation on MY device, such as a Web-dav supported NAS?
I previously changed my phone, from Android to iOS. Accumulated for years of WhatsApp conversations, there are many valuable memories, both good and bad. I want to keep that, for it is a part of my history.
As I was not being able to transfer the conversation to iOS at that time, I investigated many methods to retain those WhatsApp conversations and make it accessible.
The outcome was brutal, it was hard. I need to root my phone, obtain the secret key to get access to the backup database by using this nice little tool.
But for my iOS WhatsApp conversation (not to mention my older Windows Phone conversations). Sigh… no good solution.
40,000 message limit for export? Are you serious?
Finally, export. We can export some conversation to a txt document. It is said that:
When exporting with media, you can send up to 10,000 latest messages. Without media, you can send 40,000 messages. These constraints are due to maximum email sizes.
I am not sure the limit was because of the internal data structure (if you can access the internal database, you will realize the conversation is a bunch of small emails).
But if maximum email sizes is referring to export conversation and send as an email attachment, then it was another very problematic behavior. We have plenty of methods transferring data from your phone to computer. A 25 MB limit should be something in the last century.
How come such a popular application does not support such a basic function? Telegram, Signal (does not support iOS ←> Android yet, or even WeChat (sadly, it was the best, as it provides various types of export methods) offers a nice solution on backup / export.
Please! WhatsApp! Make your migrate / backup / export function more accessible and fully functional! You are worth USD 19 billion! Your parent company Meta can export Facebook / Instagram’s data into a fairly accessible format. Why can’t you do that.