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My phone having recently died, I've recently discovered a number of very annoying limitation to WhatsApp that are making me question my use of it: 1. It's impo
by nicoburns 5y ago
My phone having recently died, I've recently discovered a number of very annoying limitation to WhatsApp that are making me question my use of it:
1. It's impossible to export your chat history, except for one conversation at a time. The only exception to this is if you root an android phone which gives you access to the raw database.
2. It's impossible to move chat history from an android device to an iOS device. And moving from ios to android is only possible with certain samsung phones.
3. It's impossible to access WhatsApp from more than one phone at once. This is mostly still true with this update. You cannot use the mobile app as a "companion device".
Do people not consider their chat histories valuable? I have my SMS history going back to 2011 (when I first got an android phone). Email can be archived. Facebook messenger keeps messages in perpetuity. WhatsApp is a frustrating outlier here.
- illyism 5y agoNo, I clear my history from time to time manually. It is very useful at times (to search through) but also not something I want to stick around.
- bennyp101 5y ago"Do people not consider their chat histories valuable?" Personally, no. I treat it like a real life conversation, if it's something I need to note later on, then I'll make a note of it outside of the chat app
- stavros 5y agoI go one step farther and have conversations auto-expire after a certain amount of time (e.g. a week) for both parties. Scripta volent.
- mikro2nd 5y ago"Do people not consider their chat histories valuable?" No, I consider them a positive liability and delete messages/conversations as soon as they're done/actioned. When the Brown Shirts come to get you, it'll be your own message history they hang you with. (Only slightly :)) Question: You have your SMS history going back a decade. How many times has that proven useful? I, too, used to keep messages & emails "forever" until I realised that it was doing nothing for me but becoming a maintenance burden. Now I have "max 24 months" retention policy and have never once needed to retrieve an email older than that.
- alksjdalkj 5y ago> When the Brown Shirts come to get you, it'll be your own message history they hang you with. (Only slightly :)) There are certainly some countries where this isn't a hyperbole. But in all others, suggesting that Nazis might come take you away because of messages you've written in the past is in pretty bad taste, IMO.
- mometsi 5y agoWould it have been in bad taste to say it during Hindenburg's administration? Your personal data may be more durable than benign government.
- seniorivn 5y agotell it to those cancelled for decade old tweets
- godelski 5y ago> There are certainly some countries where this isn't a hyperbole. > suggesting that Nazis might come take you away because of messages you've written in the past is in pretty bad taste These two statements seem conflicting. If we're already seeing it in places why should we not be concerned? It may be unlikely to happen here and to us, but why take the chance? The risk-reward tradeoff is extremely unbalanced. Like the above commenter said, how often do you go back in your history? As a more real west experience we do see morals changing and we have been going through cultural changes. There are plenty of people who have had tweets uncovered with positions they themselves no longer agree with. That's a question people are trying to address right now but it is a difficult one to have because it is so heated. But it does boil down to "do people change opinions?" Personally I think the answer is obvious. But it is undeniable that history gets people in trouble, even if those histories were popular opinions at the time. (I wouldn't draw parallels to Brown Shirts with these instances as there's a big difference in scale and power, but I would draw parallels to Brown Shirts for countries with authoritarian rules where text histories are large liabilities and can get you killed or jailed).
- intricatedetail 5y ago
- j3th9n 5y agoTo answer your question: I don't value chat histories that much. In the early days people didn't walk around with tape recorders to record everything everybody was saying either. If there is something really important said in a chat, you could make a screenshot, the same way you would take a note on paper with a pencil in pre-digital times, but how often did that happen? To write down an address for example, but you could put that in the digital equivalent of the rolodex, like Contacts.app or Notes. You could even go as far as to save information in a personal CRM like Monica.
- nicoburns 5y agoPeople did used to write each other letters though, which they would often keep. I definitely have some correspondence over chat that falls in that category. Perhaps I should go back to writing such messages on physical media.
- j3th9n 5y agoIf it's really something worth keeping I would probably print it out to keep it safe, instead of letting it disappear in a continuing chat, with the risk of losing it, because your data is on somebody else's server and you're not in control of it.
- seniorivn 5y agoprinted text is not going to be as durable as letters of the past
- sharikous 5y agoYou can transfer your chat history if you back it up on Google Drive and pull it from the new device. I suppose you don't want to do that, maybe because it gives a third party access to your history (although it should be E2EE), but I am writing this for readers who may stumble upon this
- shawabawa3 5y agoiOS don't let you backup or restore from google drive, only iCloud Android only let you use google drive. There's no way to transfer between the two
- er4hn 5y agoA lot of the replies I see to this are people talking about their personal chat histories. For various reasons the trend these days is to not consider those valuable* Where chat histories are valuable and where you see a "store and index it all" approach is enterprise chat. Slack, Google Hangouts Chat, etc, store and archive all the data because that is the collective wisdom of past and present employees and it is valuable to search through. Depending on the industry (i.e. Finance requires this via FINRA) it may even be mandatory to record all communications. * unless you are moving to a new device, but even then it is rare to search that far back in history.
- kace91 5y ago>2. It's impossible to move chat history from an android device to an iOS device. And moving from ios to android is only possible with certain samsung phones. It is possible to do this with third party apps. Incredibly sketchy looking apps I should add, but they do work. I've done it several times both ways.
- sizzle 5y agoSame I paid $20 for some software recommended on Reddit. No clue what it did or exploited but it transferred everything including media from android —> iOS. Best $20 I ever spent, had a lot of chats with info I search for periodically.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- MomoXenosaga 5y agoMoving from Android to iOS and vice versa has been a nightmare since forever and I don't blame WhatsApp for that.
- nicoburns 5y agoPretty much everything else has transferred over very smoothly for me so far. My passwords are all in Bitwarden so I had instant access to those. And my contacts are all in Google Contacts which transferred similarly easily. I've had to log in to a lot of apps, but other than that it's been pretty easy apart from whatsapp.
- gorgoiler 5y agoI’ve not looked, but is there no GDPR style “download your data” tool? I used that effectively to keep long term archives of all my Facebook conversations. Critical for remembering what happened when and cat photos.
- ajvs 5y agoConversations are E2EE encrypted so their tool doesn't work for those.
- tinus_hn 5y agoWhatsApp on iOS does backup all history, allowing you to transfer it to a new iOS device. Transferring history between iOS and Android is a work in progress, it works now from iPhone to Samsung devices (for reasons I don’t really understand), general support is supposed to be rolled out the coming months.
- kelnos 5y agoI also consider my chat history valuable. Is there a reason why you don't use WhatsApp's built-in backup mechanism? On Android it backs up to Google Drive, I believe. But yeah, moving history backups between Android and iOS isn't possible, which is pretty lame.
- ajvs 5y ago1) It seems the raw databases are encrypted in `/storage/emulated/0/Android/media/com.whatsapp/WhatsApp/Databases` so even being rooted isn't sufficient to dump them.
- sizzle 5y agoI paid $20 for some software reviewed on Reddit I found searching “transfer WhatsApp messages from android to iOS”, no root needed. It somehow transferred everything including media, like magic. It’s a black box and who knows what exploits they are using in the background, but just wanted to chime in and let you know it’s possible but not out of the box. If anyone is interested, I can dig up and share the software/company I purchased from.