WhatsApp adds the ability to transfer your conversation history from Android to iPhone after previously allowing users to transfer chats in other ways (from iPhone to Android). The feature was announced by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a Facebook post. WABetaInfo previously detected the first signs of the feature, which is now being released in beta.
The update helps with a long-standing WhatsApp issue, which has historically been difficult to transfer chats between the two mobile operating systems. It’s easy to transfer chats from one iOS device to another or from one Android device to another, but generally not between two different operating systems.
The transfer process only works with new or factory reset iPhones and makes use of Apple’s existing Move to iOS app for Android (which already helps move contacts, calendar entries, SMS messages, and more). During iPhone setup, select the “Move Android data” option and follow the steps in the Android app. Once the iPhone is fully set up, open WhatsApp and sign in with the same phone number. Your pre-existing Android chat history should appear.
To start the transfer, you’ll need to run Android 5 or higher on your Android device and iOS 15.5 on your iPhone. Unfortunately, if you already have a pre-existing iOS chat history, the imported Android history will overwrite it.