It’s Now Possible To Transfer WhatsApp Chats From iPhone To Android

Facebook-owned WhatsApp has officially added the ability for Samsung Galaxy smartphone owners to transfer chat history between Android and iOS devices using nothing more than a sync cable.

This feature was previously available in beta for some people but is now available to all Samsung Galaxy device owners.

It’s extremely difficult to define just how popular WhatsApp is as a global messaging application. The Facebook-owned messaging platform has billions of global users and is extremely popular in countries like India and Brazil. Although it’s a feature-rich platform that has gone from strength-t-strength under Facebook’s stewardship, it’s been lacking in the ability to transfer chat conversations from one platform to another. Until now.

The prior lack of that feature had made it extremely difficult for people to migrate from one platform to another. It’s always been possible to back up chat history on a specific device – either to iCloud or Google Drive – but importing that history to a new platform wasn’t possible.

The company is trying to rectify that problem but it looks as though it’s doing it piece-by-piece and the current deployment requires jumping through a few more hurdles than one would initially assume.

In its current form, the functionality only works when transferring from iPhone to Android. It’s not possible to go the other way. And only Galaxy smartphone owners can currently use the feature so non-Samsung owners are currently being left out in the dark. The process also requires the device owner to have a Lightning to USB-C cable in order to get the back backup transferred between devices. Hopefully, there will be a wireless option in the future but at the moment, it requires being tethered.

WhatsApp has put together a generalized guide on migrating data from iPhone to a Samsung phone here. It’s definitely worth reading and taking note of the “What do I need?” section before getting started.

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