WhatsApp is the most popular mobile messaging app on the planet, even above its sister Facebook Messenger, but it doesn’t work like that. It also doesn’t work like Telegram or Skype. In fact, WhatsApp works like the Signal from which it also derives its encryption algorithm. It means that when we change devices, the cats are no longer there because they are not stored outside of the phone.
It’s different when we do a backup, although we would already be talking about another topic. So if WhatsApp chats are not maintained when we change phones, they should only be inside our own device. The resulting question is, and where do you keep them? So let’s try to explain it to you, where WhatsApp saves the conversations inside our mobile phone.
WhatsApp stores your chats on your phone
As we said, the only way to “get” WhatsApp messages from our mobile phone is through the backup stored in the cloud, otherwise the copy remains internal. WhatsApp uses Google Drive to store external copies, so that when we change phones, we can restore the latest version (we recommend updating the copy just before changing phones) so that everything stays in its place.
But as long as this backup does not take place, WhatsApp stores everything locally. This means, for example, that once a message is delivered to its recipient, whether it is us as it is sent to us or our recipient when we send it, the message disappears from the application’s servers. Because during shipping, it goes through their servers, logically, like a switchboard that connects some users with others.
So the discussions They are stored inside the phone and we can show you the exact route. So that you can see it for yourself, you will need a file explorer installed on our mobile phone, like Google Files or similar. In Android, we find a lot of them very practical and each of them will help us dive into the bowels of our mobile (as long as the system has not protected certain folders).
Internal storage> Android> Media> com.whatsapp> WhatsApp > Data base
In our example, we will be using Google Files or ‘Google Files’, installed by default on our Google Pixel 5. Just open it. to see the system directory tree and from there we can start browsing. We mark the folders we browse:
- Internal storage
- Android
- Media
- com.whatsapp
- Data base
We arrive at the ‘Databases’ folder after following the path we have indicated and we come across a list of files each of which represents the database for each of the days on which it was created. They are the copies that WhatsApp updates every day until the next one, and it is these copies that are then exported to an external server in the case of their saving in Google Drive. You will see that only a few days are recorded, and that is that WhatsApp eliminates the oldest files so that they do not devour the internal memory of our phone.
Text chats and other files (images, videos, audios, stickers) are stored separately.
But here we only find the chats, the text of each of our conversations. To locate the rest of the files that we exchange for WhatsApp, we need to go back to the previous folder, to WhatsApp, and then access media. There we can see animated gifs, images, videos, audio files, voice notes, documents and even profile photos. And yes, also the stickers. Although many of these folders are easily accessible from other phone apps like Google Photos.
So, you already know where our WhatsApp chats are stored. In the bowels of our cell phone so that only we can access it. And when they leave the phone to go to the cloud, they are also registered with our user so, again, to be protected from unwanted access.
