Good morning. A colleague of mine has moved from an old iPhone to a newer Android phone. She uses WhatsApp a lot for customer engagement and is terrified at the idea of loosing all of her WhatsApp backups when moving to Android. She has a WhatsApp backup in iCloud,but all the solutions on the Web only suggest that she manually “archive and email” the individual WhatsApp chats. Not exactly a solution, as she has hundreds of message threads. Does anyone know of a tool that would convert an iCloud WhatsApp archive to an “Android-format” ? From what I understand, the lack of interoperability is linked to the way iCloud deals with the encrypted files, Google Drive using a different format (or something like that).
Any help would be greatly appreciated, she cannot be the only person with a problem like that…
Thanks !
After some quick web searching, it appears that a third-party application is required to do this. The normal backup/restore process works if you’re migrating from iOS to a new iOS device or from Android to a new Android device, but not cross-platform, because the iOS version stores its backups in iCloud while the Android version stores its backups in Google Drive.
(But I found one article claiming that the latest versions of WhatsApp will let you just backup from one app and restore from the other as a part of its installation and setup. So you might want to try that first.)
I have no product recommendations because I have never used WhatsApp, but here’s one of the first articles I found on the subject. It describes three possible third-party transfer applications that claim to get the job done:
Thank you David, sadly, this did not work out… also due to the fact that she is using a Neanderthal iPhone and thus cannot use the latest version of IOS and iCloud… I told her to take a couple days off and do it manually 
This is really something Facebook/WhatsApp should look into…
And am surprised at the cultural difference between the US and EU apparently… there seem to be many more people using WhatsApp on this side of the pond
I’ve always associated WhatsApp with China, and that’s what I attributed its lower perceived uptake in the US to. Perhaps Europe has a broader exposure to Chinese apps. I think I know only one or two people who’ve used it, and that’s because they have ties to people with their own links to China. I was thinking WeChat—oops!
Personally, I’ve refused to use WhatsApp (and many other messaging apps) for the practical reason of not wanting to participate in multiple separate messaging ecosystems—people can connect with me in Messages via iMessage or SMS. And I won’t use anything associated with Facebook for personal communications on principle.
But if you’re in a position where you need to meet people where they are, WhatsApp is certainly one of the major apps.
He he we even use WeChat a lot… 
I don’t think WhatsApp has any connection to China (AFAIK, it doesn’t even work there). It’s very widely used in the UK. I find it handy to have Messages and WhatsApp accounts: WA seems to handle group messaging much better. Its live position update seems also to be very good.
Doh! Brain short… I was thinking WeChat!
iOS market share is way higher over here. Almost everybody I work with closely, I contact through iMessage.
If Google had successfully copied and integrated in Android something like iMessage early on I suspect we probably wouldn’t even know what WhatsApp is. ;)
Then there’s the cross-platform Telegram (or even Signal) which sync flawlessly and instantly across devices (iMessage fails to sync accurately and quickly for a lot of users), and both are fully end-to-end encrypted – hence their popularity amongst many users, especially in certain countries with authoritarian regimes, et al.
Messaging is a complete mess.
Too much legacy (SMS/MMS), non-encrypted (SMS/MMS, again), single platform (iMessage), telephony only (WhatsApp, natively at least), or simply unpopular (Telegram, Signal, others; take your pick).
Wasn’t SMS reportedly due for an upgrade away from System 7 legacy issues, a while ago?
A quick search brought up RCS, which is apparently being rolled out across carriers worldwide during 2020 (not that it’s very obvious to users, if they are doing so, IMO!).
However, that article states it’s not encrypted either, so I don’t get the point (nor likely will most users), given while it may be cross-platform, everything it does it pretty much done by most modern proprietary services already.
Such complication forever, is seems. 