On Wednesday, WhatsApp announced a long-awaited functionality that allows users to sync their chat history between iOS and Android phones. Users have been waiting for this functionality for a long time, and up until now, if you went from an iPhone to an Android phone or vice versa, you had to rely on third-party applications, complete difficult processes, or just give up your conversation history. When you transition from iOS to Android, WhatsApp will now allow you to transfer your chat history with you, including any voice notes, pictures, and chats.
WhatsApp offers an easy answer to this problem with the new functionality. Users will be able to utilise the function to move their conversation history from iPhones to Samsung phones, starting with the South Korean tech giant’s new foldables, according to the statement made at the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event.
Samsung appears to be anticipating that this would lure consumers who are interested in its new folding phones but are locked into their iPhones. According to WhatsApp, the functionality will soon be available for both iOS and Android and will operate in both directions. Because a user’s complete conversation history is encrypted end-to-end on their own device, transferring chats with voice notes ran into technological difficulties. WhatsApp claims to have collaborated with the world’s leading phone and operating system manufacturers to achieve this.
The new functionality should help alleviate one of WhatsApp’s most vexing issues: the fact that your chat history has never been officially transferable between mobile operating systems. If you utilize WhatsApp’s cloud backup option, your chat histories are kept in iCloud on iOS and Google Drive on Android, which means you can only move your talks across phones that run the same operating system.
Rather of transmitting chat histories over the internet, the new functionality uploads them via a physical Lightning to USB-C connection. If you’ve previously transferred between iOS and Android and have two distinct cloud backups, the new transfer option will not combine them into a single chat history. Instead, if you use WhatsApp to migrate your chat history and then back it up, it will overwrite any previous backups, according to WhatsApp.
According to WhatsApp, the new functionality will first allow transfers from iOS to Samsung’s new foldables, with transfers to Samsung smartphones running Android 10 and above arriving “in the coming weeks.” It didn’t specify when the capability will be available for non-Samsung Android phones or when Android to iOS transfers would be possible.
