Move WhatsApp Messages from Android to iPhone — Not Free
2 min readFeb 9, 2019
In this article I share the steps followed to successfully move WhatsApp data from an Android device to an iPhone. This process worked fine as of Feb 9, 2019 and costed $25 USD. It takes about an hour and heavily depends on the amount of data. And we do not need to root the android device. After reading several articles, I realized that there is no easy way to do this for free — not even for software developers! Wish WhatsApp provides a solution for this. If you know of a way please share in the comments.
- Download Backuptrans software from https://www.backuptrans.com/android-whatsapp-transfer.html. I am using a Mac and will elucidate for the same platform but the steps should pretty much the same (or less) on a Windows machine.
- Feel free to try it before purchasing. The free version transfers only 20 messages.
- Enable USB debugging on the Android phone as described at https://developer.android.com/studio/debug/dev-options#enable
- Open Backuptrans and connect your Android device to Mac
- Unlock the Android device and hit “Trust the Device” (like) button on the phone
- Then, hit “Back up my data” on your phone
- In Backuptrans the Android phone should be detected under “Devices” section
- Right click on your device and hit “Backup Messages”. This will copy the messages and the media to your laptop.
- If the backup was successful, you should see a new file under “Local Databases” in Backuptrans.
- Right click on Devices > [ Your Device ] and hit disconnect your Android device
- Connect your iPhone now to the Mac, unlock it, turn off iCloud Backup and “Find my iPhone” features (not sure why they need this)
- iTunes should open automatically and detect your device. Similarly, hit “Trust Device” (like) button on your iPhone to establish a connection between your iPhone and Mac
- In Backuptrans now right click on Local Databases > [ Your back up ] and select “Transfer messages from Database to iPhone”
- Based on the number of messages, it may take a while. Try these steps first on the trail version and then repeat the same after purchasing the license. The cheapest license (as of Feb 9, 2019) lets you transfer for up to 3 devices for $25, but I only ended up using 1 instance!
- Thats it! Enjoy your new iPhone :)
