We have good news for those WhatsApp users who are thinking of leaving the Android realm to join Apple’s ecosystem. Soon, the transition between the two platforms will be easier.
The latest version of the Move to iOS app for Android will now check if you have a WhatsApp account on your Android phone, and if you do, it will open WhatsApp and offer you the option to transfer your data to your iPhone as an encrypted package. This will keep all of your messages and threads fully intact.
However, don’t get too excited just yet. In order for the feature to work, it must be supported by both the “Move to iOS” app and WhatsApp. It is currently available in the former, but it is supported only by the beta version of the WhatsApp application. Presumably, it will be available in the public version soon as well. Also, for the feature to work, your Android phone must be running on Android 12, and your iPhone must be on the latest version of iOS.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, said in a statement that the ability to transfer your WhatsApp data from Android to iOS with ease was a “top requested feature.” WhatsApp users can already move data from iOS to Android, so it was only a matter of time until Meta added a feature to do the opposite.