If you’ve made the exciting decision to buy a new phone you’re sure to want to bring all of your personal WhatsApp messages across with you to your new device.
Frustratingly, although the hugely popular free messaging service does feature a handy back-up function it can’t be used to transfer any of your existing WhatsApp messages over from iOS to Android (and vice versa) due to the compatibility issues between iCloud and Google Drive.
There are however a selection of both free and paid tools, which are all completely legitimate and very straightforward to use, you’re able to download in order to help you accomplish this.
WhatsApp's own email chat function
While this may not be a very practical solution for anybody who wants to transfer their entire WhatsApp chat history over, as they’ll only ever appear as a text files and can’t be opened in the app, if you’ve got a few conversations which contain information you’d like to refer back to (maybe some directions for example) it’s a very simple way of storing them.
Pull up the app and go into the chat you’d like to send over. Select the name of your chat and then scroll down to the export chat option where you’ll be able to decide whether or not you’d like to attach all of the different kinds of media (photos, videos etc.) you’ve received.
You should then pick mail from the list of options presented which will take you to a blank email with your chat automatically attached in a .txt file so you can send it to whomever you’d like.
Third party transfer tools
Below are a few examples of the wide range of transfer tools you can find on offer all across the web. All three listed here are totally legal and very safe to use and while the first option might require you to pay a small fee of £3.19, the second two offer both a paid and free trial version.
Although both editions come with slightly different benefits, your free trial for example will run out after a period of time but the paid one will be yours forever, luckily they work in exactly the same way when it comes to transferring your WhatApp messages across.
i-Phone Backup Browser and Wazzup Migrator
Download the i-Phone Backup Browser before connecting your i-Phone up to your computer via a USB cable and make a back-up of all its contents using iTunes. Open up the tool, find the back-up you’ve just created and extract the file named ChatStorage.sqlite to a new folder on your computer.
Disconnect your i-Phone, connect your new Android device and then drag and drop your extracted WhatApp conversations into its internal memory.
Unplug that smartphone and download the Wazzup Migrator along with WhatsApp from the Google Play Store. Enter Wazzup and press the select i-Phone archive icon which will prompt the app to start extracting all of your conversations to WhatsApp.
The next time you open up WhatsApp all of your old chats should be there.
Dr Fone
Launch whichever version of the Dr Fone Toolkit you’ve gone for on your computer and select the Backup & Restore WhatsApp option. Connect up both of your devices at the same time via USB cables and wait a few seconds until they’re detected by the software.
Press the transfer button and wait a little while until its all been completed. After it's done, disconnect both devices and open up WhatsApp on your new Android smartphone where a dialogue box should pop up offering to restore all of your existing WhatsApp messages to the app.
Backuptrans
Make sure you’ve got iTunes version 11.0 or above installed on your computer and that your Android device has USB debugging switched on before opening up the Backuptrans software and connecting up both of your devices via USB cables.
Both devices should then appear as icons in the sidebar so select your old i-Phone and selection the transfer messages from iPhone to Android option which should be easily visible in the top tool bar.
Once it’s done, disconnect both devices and open up WhatsApp on your new smartphone. If your collection of messages don’t appear, try going into your settings and clearing your cache before opening it up again.
