My partner recently made the leap from iPhone to Android. “So how do I get my WhatsApp messages from my old phone to my new one?” they asked shortly after setting the new phone up. “Simple!” I chirped. “You just restore it from your backup.” How wrong I was. It turns out your WhatsApp chat history—all those thousands of photos and messages—can’t be moved between operating systems.
Wired UK
This story originally appeared on WIRED UK.
It’s one of those simple-sounding questions. And it should just work, right? You’ve got a backup somewhere in the cloud, so why can’t you download it onto a different operating system and take your archive of messages, photos and videos with you wherever you go, forevermore? You might assume WhatsApp is WhatsApp regardless of whether it’s on Android or iOS—well, turns out it isn’t.
Pop the quandary into a search engine of your choice and you quickly find yourself drowning in a confusing slurry of poorly written step-by-step guides, most of which are technically inaccurate or just downright misleading. I’ll spare you the headache and heartache: you can’t do it. It is currently not possible to move your WhatsApp backup from Android to iOS and vice versa.
Except you can. If you’re willing to use third-party software and follow a series of fiddly, convoluted steps. But do you really want to hand over your whole WhatsApp chat history to a piece of software called Wazzap ..
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