In case you’re changing your phone, transferring WhatsApp chats has been one of the most difficult tasks. While WhatsApp is working on allowing users to transfer their chats between Android and iOS devices, migrating your chats when you chat when you change your number has remained another contentious issue.
Even if users wanted to perform a fresh install, WhatsApp wants you to use the same mobile number to restore the chats from either the device or from a cloud. In case you had to switch your mobile number, you are forced to let go of your old chats. However, it looks like this is changing soon.
Trusted folks at WABetaInfo hint that the Facebook-led messaging platform is working on a new tool that will help users transfer the chat history to a different number. Apart from chats, this tool is also expected to transfer all the media to the new number/phone.
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The feature that currently under development, aims to preserve your chat history and will be automatically initiated before migrating your chat history, is expected to be released along with the inter OS transfer feature. As of now, when you change your smartphone, WhatsApp only allows you to transfer the history between Android devices seamlessly.
In a related piece of news, WhatsApp is also currently working on securing the chat backups. The company was recently spotted testing chat backups that are end-to-end encrypted while being stored on Google Drive. While the chats and the media shared between individuals or groups are end-to-end encrypted, the automatic backups weren’t.
Since chat and media backups on Google Drive on Android is the most commonly used backup solution, WhatsApp needed to ensure that this loophole is also covered and any scope of data leak is preempted.
This feature will become critical when WhatsApp introduces inter OS chat transfer or chat and media backup transfer to a new mobile number giving privacy-conscious users peace of mind.
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