WhatsApp Might Soon Have Chat History Transfer Between iOS, Android

Despite the many privacy concerns WhatsApp has recently been involved in courtesy of parent company Facebook, there are still many users that remain heavily invested in the messaging service. To be fair, WhatsApp does currently have strong privacy safeguards, at least for now, and it is expanding its features to support a multi-device world. Ironically, those two goals don't always align, as seen in the case of transferring between Android phones and iPhones, something that might finally become easier once this chat history migration feature becomes available.

Part of WhatsApp's appeal is its end-to-end encryption or E2EE and its privacy protections. That's partly made possible by the fact that chats are stored on-device rather than in the cloud, away from prying eyes. That is also why many malware programs try hard to access the data that WhatsApp stores on phones to try and get the juicy bits of people's conversations.

Unfortunately, the disadvantage of this system is that directly transferring from one supported platform to another isn't exactly straightforward. WhatsApp does have cloud backups for that purpose but it doesn't always work flawlessly. Unsurprisingly, there are third-party solutions that WhatsApp doesn't encourage due to their privacy and security risks.

Fortunately, WABetaInfo discovered signs that WhatsApp is finally working on an official way to do exactly that. The info page to transfer chat history from iOS to Android appeared in a beta version of the app but remains non-functional. There is also no timeline for this feature but its existence at least gives hope that it is in the works.

This chat history migration goes in line with WhatsApp's efforts to cover as many devices and platforms as possible. Like many of its kind, the messaging service started out as a phone-only app and eventually found its way to web browsers just recently.