The one downside of kicking WhatsApp from your app collection is losing all of your chat history. Because you may just, one day, need that Netflix password your sibling sent you in 2016. iOS and Android users will now be able to import their WhatsApp chat history into Telegram, which effectively solves that issue.
Telegram has seen an incremental increase in users following WhatsApp’s update to its terms of service, that will require users opt-in to have their data shared with Facebook. Many users jumped to Telegram without much knowledge of the service, and we even saw South Africans use the app’s ‘People Nearby’ feature for some insidious business opportunities.
According to 9to5Mac, Telegram’s version 7.4 will introduce the ability to import WhatsApp chat history. Obviously, this will only work for contacts who are already on Telegram, and the import process has to be done by hand (quite literally). It was initially thought that the feature was only available on iOS, but it’s since been confirmed that Android users will see the functionality in the latest update too.
How Telegram’s importation works
As reported by The Verge, importing WhatsApp chats to Telegram will follow a chat-by-chat process and will pull through both individual conversations and group convos.
If you’re ready to officially drop WhatsApp for Telegram, you’ll have to head to each chat (individual or otherwise) that you want to bring with you. On iOS, head to the chat you want to port, tap on the user’s name at the top of the chat and head to the more info screen. Here you’ll see an option to ‘Export Chat’, hit that and it’ll open the iOS Share Sheet, after which you’ll choose Telegram. Simply pick the Telegram chat you’d like to import it to.
The process on Android is similar, but here the “Export Chat” option sits in the little three-dot (or burger- if that’s your thing) menu in the right-hand top corner. Just tap ‘More’ and you’ll find the thing you’re looking for. Once the import is done, you’ll see a whole lot going on in the Telegram chat, but don’t panic! All messages that migrated will sit with an “Imported” label on them — this is just to note when the import happened.
You’ll also have the option to bring all of the media from that particular chat with you. “Imported messages appear in the order in which they are imported, rather than in the order they were originally sent,” The Verge details.
This is by no means a revolutionary feature, but it could help users who are planning on porting from WhatsApp completely in the next few weeks get their chat ducks in a row.