Transferring the chat archive from iPhone to Android is now possible, not only on Samsung Galaxy: Google announces the extension of the function, but it's yellow on the Android version
At the beginning of September, WhatsApp made official an important novelty and long-awaited by millions of users around the world: the possibility of transferring the chat archive from an Apple iPhone phone to a Samsung Android phone. At the same time, it also announced that this feature would soon be extended to other Android models, from other manufacturers. Less than two months later, now, Google announces that this is it: all Android devices will have this possibility.
This is not a small news, because the impossibility to transfer their chats from iPhone to Android has limited many Apple users who would have wanted to make the jump to Android. But that's not all: with the introduction of multi-device WhatsApp, currently in beta but available to everyone, it's much more likely that a user will ask to use WhatsApp on a mixed Android-iOS configuration. Perhaps an iPhone and an Android tablet. The full dialogue between the two worlds, then, can no longer be postponed with the excuse that end-to-end encryption makes things difficult, not least because other encrypted messaging apps (one of all: Telegram) don't have such stringent limits. Here, then, is when and how you will be able to transfer your WhatsApp chats from iPhone to Android.
Chat WhatsApp from iPhone to Android: how to do it
The mechanism announced by Google is identical to the one already seen for Samsung phones: you need to connect the two devices with a USB-Lightning cable (at least until Apple surrenders to the EU and decides to use USB-C, like everyone else) and, when prompted during the configuration of the new Android device, scan a QR code from the iPhone to start the process of transferring WhatsApp chats.
At this point, the data starts flowing down the cable, from the iPhone to the new Android phone, without any steps from the cloud. During the transfer, which might take a while if there is a lot of data, all incoming WhatsApp messages (on the iPhone) will be temporarily blocked so that they will only be displayed on the Android phone at the end of the procedure.
WhatsApp from iPhone to Android: when it arrives
There's a little mystery about the timing of the arrival of this new feature on all Android phones: Google says it's already available on all Pixel phones (and of course Samsung Galaxy) and that it will be available on new smartphones that come out of the factory with Android 12, but it doesn't specifically mention those with earlier versions of Android.
However, it should be noted that at the moment the Samsung Galaxy do not yet have Android 12 and that not all Pixels have already received the update to the latest version of Google's operating system. Yet with these devices the procedure is possible.
The most likely thing, then, is that in a few weeks the possibility to transfer chats from iPhone to Android will be extended at least to phones running Android 11.