Android’s ‘Data Restore Tool’ will soon let you transfer WhatsApp chats from iOS

As much as smartphones have made much of our lives more efficient and streamlined to a nearly detrimental degree, switching between them can sometimes be more than slightly frustrating. As much as Android and Apple alike have a plethora of cloud backup and file transferring options, we’re willing to bet you’ve gone through the process of transferring all your data across two phones and found some things missing.

WhatsApp has notoriously never had a super reliable way of transferring chats and chat history between Android and Apple phones. Now Android is testing out an official and reliable way to do just that using its ‘Data Restore Tool’. 

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The Data Restore Tool is Android’s in-house method of transferring all your data between phones. It copies all media, apps, and files to your new phone, and sends them over from your old one, even if it’s iOS. Now, obviously, it can’t transfer everything as some apps, settings, and data are exclusive to an OS. Until now, WhatsApp chats found themselves in that category too.

The newest update for Data Restore Tool includes a few lines of code (spotted by the pros over on 9to5Google) that appear to be laying the groundwork for a future update that will include the ability to transfer your chats between Android and iOS devices.

Here’s how9to5Google says it will work. In the Data Restore Tool app, head over to the ‘Transfer WhatsApp chats’ tab. There, you’ll find a QR code that you’ll need to scan with your iPhone. This will take you over to WhatsApp. Hit ‘Start’ and the app will make use of some upcoming “migration settings” to bring your chats across.

It’s an incredibly useful feature that users on both sides of the fence have been asking for forever now, though we don’t know when it might arrive in full. Since this comes by way of an Android app, it unfortunately presumably doesn’t work both ways. But with the rate at which WhatsApp’s been pumping out updates, we’re sure there’ll be an Android to iOS equivalent soon enough.