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Extracting WhatsApp Messages from an iOS Backup
- Threeve303 4y agoAnyone know of a good way to extract information from the Notes app using Ubuntu?
- hvaoc 4y agoHaven’t tried this yet but was looking for a way to do this and found this - https://www.npmjs.com/package/apple-icloud https://www.npmjs.com/package/apple-icloud
- jishiav042 4y agoThat escalated quickly.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoLost all of my WhatsApp messages when moving from android to iPhone. This would have been nice if I still ajay that android phone.
- yasoob 4y agoSame here! Moved to iOS around 2 years ago. I also wasn’t sure how legit the paid migration software were so decided not to waste any money on them. Then I recently realized that being a programmer I should be able to cobble something together if I were to ever make a reverse transition. And that is how this article was born :)
- hnick 4y agoWe had a license for some paid software for another reason, but it didn't work for me. I won't name them because support was very helpful, even gave me a beta to try, but by then I'd moved on. I think my archive was simply too big and it was causing issues.
- TuringNYC 4y agoThank you so much for this. We recently migrated a relative's phone from Android to iPhone and were shocked to notice there is no way to migrate WhatsApp account history from the Android-->iOS. Do you have any suggestions for this?
- yasoob 4y agoI know there is a paid app on Playstore that apparently works. Don’t remember the name. Will have to look it up. I came across it during my research. But there is also this on GitHub: https://github.com/residentsummer/watoi https://github.com/residentsummer/watoi Give it a try and see how it goes?
- sirusdas 4y agoThis is Android to IOS i was think of IOS to Android. Btw i was wondering why do the paid apps charge so much for this transfer. But thanks to you now i know this stuff is complicated and you have done an amazing work decoding it. What if now the next post about how to import this to Android? Then a program which is open source project for this purpose? But Only if you have time!
- rgomezcasas 4y agoOne year ago I migrated from Android to iOS and used iCareFone for WhatsApp Transfer to do the migration processes. It worked perfectly. It’s a subscription software, so I signed up for 1 month, did the migration, and then cancelled my account.
- ars 4y agoWutsapper works: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wondershare.wutsapper.android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wondershar... I used it, it's a very slow, very nerve wracking experience, but it works. You MUST have fully charged phones before you start!! And they need good battery life, since there's no way to charge them while it works. See here for some comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/whatsapp/comments/qo1wfc/the_current_state_of_transferring_whatsapp_data/ https://www.reddit.com/r/whatsapp/comments/qo1wfc/the_curren...
- cube00 4y agoIt's interesting that you can get the decryption key on iOS but the only way to do it on Android is to root your device.
- Gigachad 4y agoThe days of android being free and open are long gone. Now there are several aspects of android that are more locked down than iOS. For example android has an api which allows disabling the screenshot feature. While iOS only allows apps to listen for when a screenshot has happened.
- realusername 4y agoI also don't understand who thought it would be a good idea to disable screenshots... Android is becoming worse every year.
- nixass 4y agoBanking apps?
- rosndo 4y agoLiterally something I regularly need to take screenshots of for payment confirmations etc.
- amelius 4y agoI use my tablet for that, i.e. by taking pictures of the screen of my phone.
- realusername 4y agoThat doesn't make any sense, how I'm suppose to do my personal budgeting? And by the way you can screenshot in a browser.
- codetrotter 4y agoYou might also be interested in a software called iMazing. It’s a paid piece of software, not free, but it’s worth the price imo. I use it mainly for transferring photos from my iPhone to my MacBook Pro M1. But I know that iMazing can back up WhatsApp messages as well, among other features. https://imazing.com/ https://imazing.com/ https://imazing.com/guides/export-and-print-whatsapp-chats-from-iphone-to-mac-pc https://imazing.com/guides/export-and-print-whatsapp-chats-f...
- icnci 4y agoExactly the solution I was looking for. Thank you!
- moreira 4y ago> I use it mainly for transferring photos from my iPhone to my MacBook Pro M1. This caught me by surprise; I'm not sure if you're aware, but you can open up Image Capture (built-in Mac app) to import photos from your iPhone. Obviously iMazing can do other things as well, but just in case.
- shivshivshiv 4y ago[dead]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- app4soft 4y ago> https://github.com/residentsummer/watoi https://github.com/residentsummer/watoi Nice! Is there same for extracts dB of Viber & Facebook apps from Android and transfer to another Android?
- shivshivshiv 4y agoI've never used Viber so not sure sorry, but Android to Android is pretty straight forward for apps Instagram and Facebook - simply log in on the new phone, right?
- GekkePrutser 4y agoIt's been "soon" for a while now. And that's no use for people that need it now because they got a new phone. I'd just run the app on a VM without internet.
- baby 4y agoBack in the days you would just lose all your message history anyway with text / AOL / MSN / facebook messenger / others… so I just started accepting it as a fact of life that you can’t keep your messaging history forever.
- 88840-8855 4y agoI'm limiting the chat history of all charts to 7 days. You never know what will be used against you in the future.
- nmlt 4y agoWouldn’t it be better to know? What I mean is: your chat partners could archive your chats or some man in the middle. Better to know what you wrote, then to be blindsided later by somebody else who got hold of these archives.
- 88840-8855 4y agoi doubt that most of my chat partners have the capabilities to do that. and yes, it would be smart to make archives, but let the chat destroy itself after 7 days.
- HeckFeck 4y agoNot quite, MSN messenger had the option to save all your conversations as XML. I still have them in old backups. It's a wild throwback. Even though it is mostly mindless chatter, it is nice to have. It's definitely a shame that there was no common/interoperable format for locally stored IM history, like there is with emails.
- noisem4ker 4y agoMSN/Live Messenger automatically saved chat histories as nice XML files in the user's documents directory, along with received files, so no real effort had to be made for preservation. As for SMS texts, they could be backed up at least on later Symbian OSs, with the Nokia Ovi desktop app. On Android, backup apps would be able to do it as well. At least in theory, EU directives for data portability (the "takeout" feature) should grant access to the message history for any abiding platform. I think all chat platforms should have the decency to offer an export option, regardless of the underlying protocol. Recollecting my message history from all sources into a common database is definitely high up in my project backlog.
- noisy_boy 4y agoI thought you could backup/restore WhatsApp messages to/from Google drive? I have seen that work between two Android phones - does that feature not exist in the WhatsApp iOS app?
- ianbooker 4y agoIn iOS it does the same for iCloud. There is no official way to switch from Android to iOS, and the reverse is only possible for some newer Samsung phones.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pimlottc 4y agoOn a similar topic, is this possible with Signal or iMessage? I have an incomplete archive on my phone due to data loss but my iPad has a continuous record. I would love to get it synced to the phone.
- hsorbo 4y agoI made a guide for doing this with Signal using Frida if you can jailbreak. https://github.com/hsorbo/signal-backup-ios https://github.com/hsorbo/signal-backup-ios
- carderne 4y agoThis [0] (I made this) will let you get your messages out into Markdown/HTML + attachments, but I'm pretty sure there's no way to get them back onto your phone yet. [0] https://github.com/carderne/signal-export https://github.com/carderne/signal-export
- flas9sd 4y agolast I extracted (and migrated) WA from iOS I used idevicebackup2 and a util ideviceunback to get a decrypted sqlite database. From there it's sqlite schema discovery that is documented in multiple places, e.g. https://gist.github.com/paracycle/6107205 https://gist.github.com/paracycle/6107205 - the method of an decrypted backup skips the elaborate steps outlined in the article.
- ksec 4y agoExtracting isn't the hard part. I have yet to figure out how to append Whatsapp message from a previous backup which I have held for 8 years. The iOS backup was corrupted and I had to start over again at the time. The Whatsapp file was extracted but I never got round to it. ( Along with important pictures inside the Whatsapp) To this day I still blame on it on iOS backup problem. Which is still a thing in 2022. I wonder why Facebook hasn't made an iOS to Android Whatsapp history transfer a priority. To most people outside of US, Whatsapp history transfer is the biggest lock in with the Smartphone ecosystem.
- annadane 4y agoBecause Whatsapp was bought to eliminate the competition. There is no quality control, it's by design
- bgorman 4y agohttps://blog.google/products/android/whatsapp-chat-history/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FMKuf+%28The+Keyword+%7C+Official+Google+Blog%29 https://blog.google/products/android/whatsapp-chat-history/?...
- Fnoord 4y agoMy setup (following Schneier's essay 'data is a toxic asset') is as follows: 1 week self-destructing messages in Signal (I don't use WhatsApp). If its an important message I save it (can't remember the last time that happened), if its an important picture I save it (which then gets uploaded to Nextcloud, which gets backed up to a Synology elsewhere, and it gets deleted from my smartphone but available via Nextcloud; e.g. photo as memory of our young children). There's no data to save, no data to migrate (I also don't use Google Drive for backups) and the only data there automagically gets removed within a week. My Nextcloud is only reachable via Wireguard. If my smartphone gets compromised (ie. stolen or lost) I'd need to revoke that keypair in Wireguard.
- password4321 4y ago> the only data there automagically gets removed within a week Nice! To be clear, you can't count on the same thing happening on the other end of the connection due to various alternative Signal clients. This is kind of where Snapchat is king of the hill, but obviously nothing is perfect!
- Fnoord 4y agoThat's a fair point. Snapchat APK can be modded, with root one can make screenshots and videos (I believe it is how some revenche porn is made). There's also analog screenshots (photos), and the end point (smartphone) can be hacked e.g. contain malware. In my M.O. I assume the end point is not compromised and is honest; otherwise, whatever I write can be traced back to me. Best thing would be not saying it, but if you were to make a good setup it wouldn't involve Android or iOS but something like Tails. And yet, we know deployed military in Ukraine don't use such. But what they do is better than analogue Russian on 8900 MHz.
- unstatusthequo 4y agoAlso Elcomsoft phone breaker, which also grabs iCloud backups.
- Someone 4y agoThis kind of hacking shouldn’t be necessary. I think WhatsApp should be fined heavily for not providing the portability that the GDPR requires them to provide. Yes, (on iOS) you can export your settings and each individual chat, but IMO they should have a one-click solution. (I think their argument for not having to provide it is that WhatsApp messages are stored on each user’s phone, not on their servers, but IMO, they still are inside WhatsApp’s realm. Certainly, on iOS you cannot open them in any other way than to the WhatsApp app)
- candace20 4y ago