It's interesting to watch consumer behaviour around Telegram's growth and how much value people place on preserving conversation history at the expense of security and privacy. Even people who are aware that e2e encryption is only enabled on Telegram when you explicitly open a private chat soon abandon it because it lacks multi-device support which makes it easy to miss messages.
WhatsApp has always simplified their security model by not even attempting to support multiple devices (the desktop app communicates via your phone instead of directly with the servers). This greatly simplifies the server infrastructure for WhatsApp too, but there really is no good excuse for them not supporting portable local backup and restore after all these years.
For your friend's sake, the app Anytrans claims to be able to backup and restore WhatsApp between platforms. I haven't tried it for that, but it might be worth checking out. It's part of Setapp.
> It's interesting to watch consumer behaviour around Telegram's growth and how much value people place on preserving conversation history at the expense of security and privacy.
Persistent, multi-device conversation history might not seem valuable at first glance, but I can say that it's saved me a lot of trouble numerous times. In theory one could back up important messages from WhatsApp/Signal as they show up, but the problem is that the vast majority of the messages that end up being valuable at some point down the road are precisely those that seemed inconsequential in the moment. By the time you realize you need them they've been long deleted.
I'm not sure if this is a feature I got grandfathered into, but I've got WhatsApp set to back my messages up to Google Drive every week. On my Android phone, the setting is in settings -> chats -> chat backup.
It's something they still push aggressively - on Android. For iOS, I believe they use iCloud, and only iCloud; this means you can switch between Android handsets, or Apple handsets, but not Android to Apple (or vice-versa).
Note that this is based off what I've seen and heard from others, however - I've never actually owned an iPhone to test this.
It's interesting to watch consumer behaviour around Telegram's growth and how much value people place on preserving conversation history at the expense of security and privacy
Telegram has a feature to import all of your WhatsApp history, but I haven't tried it yet.
Indeed, Telegram's appeal comes more from its superior feature set than privacy. It is very convenient to have everything backed up server-side and seamlessly run the same chat app on as many and as various devices as you wish.
>For your friend's sake, the app Anytrans claims to be able to backup and restore WhatsApp between platforms. I haven't tried it for that, but it might be worth checking out. It's part of Setapp.
We tried that and a number of other apps, even a paid one. It apparently only worked with older versions of WhatsApp.
WhatsApp has always simplified their security model by not even attempting to support multiple devices (the desktop app communicates via your phone instead of directly with the servers). This greatly simplifies the server infrastructure for WhatsApp too, but there really is no good excuse for them not supporting portable local backup and restore after all these years.
For your friend's sake, the app Anytrans claims to be able to backup and restore WhatsApp between platforms. I haven't tried it for that, but it might be worth checking out. It's part of Setapp.