WhatsApp users could well discover a very unpleasant surprise in the coming weeks. The application would provide a major and paid change to one of its most popular features.
Google recently made a fairly radical decision regarding the use of WhatsApp on Android smartphones. In the coming weeks, the online storage of your messages and backups will be deducted from your Google Drive. This may prevent certain people from storing and retrieving their conversations (for example when changing their phone) if they no longer have sufficient storage space on their Google Drive account.
Until now, Android smartphone owners had an advantage over WhatsApp users on iPhone. On Apple phones, users must store all of their conversations and messages in their iCloud account, which can quickly lead to their free account being overwhelmed. As a reminder, iCloud only has 5 GB of space in its basic free version. It is therefore enough to save a few chats with photos, videos or somewhat heavy documents to fill this space and no longer be able to save more data from WhatsApp.
WhatsApp users on Android smartphones, however, have until now had unlimited storage space through Google Drive. It was then possible to save a large number of conversations and messages there to retrieve them on another device.
But in a few weeks, Google will change its method for backing up your messages. These will now take up space on your Google Drive storage which, as a reminder, is limited to 15 GB in its free basic offer and included with your account. Add to this the fact that Google Drive also manages your photos and Gmail emails, and you will understand that it is very easy to completely fill the available storage with your WhatsApp conversations. Fortunately there is a small solution to solve this problem.
The technique that we can recommend to you is to create a Gmail account dedicated to your WhatsApp backups. To do this, create a new Gmail account on the site or in the dedicated application. Then go to the WhatsApp settings, then to the “chat backup” section where you can select the Google account you want to use for your backups.