Whatsapp Android To iOS Importer

Migrate Whatsapp chats history from Android to iOS.

Caveats

• Media files and shared locations are not imported (got placeholders instead)
• Messages from contacts that changed ids (phone numbers) are not linked

User-contributed guides

Thanks to our excellent community members, there are few guides that may be easier to follow than one written by me. Some of them include instructions on how to extract whatsapp database from Android phone.

• 2021-11-17: full guide by @tim25651
• 2021-12-30: full guide by @needs-coffee, on Windows via MacOS VM

Many users also contributed tips on how to get certain prerequisites done.

• 2021-01-07: getting database from Android by @MaxWolodin
• 2021-06-23: MacOS VM setup by @5E7EN
• See #9, #27, #28, #35 and #43 for more tips and cases

Prerequisites

• Mac with installed Xcode and iTunes (or MacOS VM)
• Decrypted msgstore.db from Android
• Installed and activated Whatsapp on your iDevice
• Whatsapp.ipa of the same version (google will help)

Step-by-step guide

• Check that Whatsapp is activated on iDevice. You should see the list of group chats when you open the app. Most likely, there won't be any messages prior to moving to iOS. You can even send/receive a message or two to be sure that there is something to back up.

• If you're on Mac OS 10.14 or later, enable full disk access for your terminal app.

• Build the migration utility (I'll assume ~/Downloads folder):

  cd ~/Downloads
  git clone https://github.com/residentsummer/watoi
  cd watoi
  xcodebuild -project watoi.xcodeproj -target watoi
  

• Create an unencrypted backup to local computer (not iCloud) with iTunes.

• Find out the ID of the latest backup and export it into an env var for later use

  scripts/bedit.sh list-backups
  # total 0
  # drwxr-xr-x@   266 user  staff    8512 Nov 19 22:25 3105fe2b1e4688d54920d5b7eff3a06a71fd5957  # <= this is the latest
  # drwxr-xr-x  20781 user  staff  664992 Aug 16 14:19 e38ebede76a7801807fe98684fd6d0b7fc3e64ba
  
  export BACKUP_ID="put ID of the backup here"
  # For example (do not copy-paste the line below, your ID will be different!):
  # export BACKUP_ID=3105fe2b1e4688d54920d5b7eff3a06a71fd5957
  

• Extract whatsapp's chat storage and backup important files

  export ORIGINALS="originals/$(date +%s)"
  mkdir -p $ORIGINALS
  scripts/bedit.sh extract-chats $BACKUP_ID $ORIGINALS/ChatStorage.sqlite
  scripts/bedit.sh extract-blob $BACKUP_ID Manifest.db $ORIGINALS/Manifest.db
  cp $ORIGINALS/ChatStorage.sqlite ./ChatStorage.sqlite
  

• Extract the contents of Whatsapp.ipa (we'll need CoreData description files):

  cd ~/Downloads/watoi
  unzip ~/Downloads/WhatsApp_Messenger_x.y.z.ipa -d app
  

• Run the migration:

  build/Release/watoi <path-to-msgstore.db> ./ChatStorage.sqlite app/Payload/WhatsApp.app/Frameworks/Core.framework/WhatsAppChat.momd
  

• Replace database file inside the backup with the updated one:

  scripts/bedit.sh replace-chats $BACKUP_ID ./ChatStorage.sqlite
  

• Restore the backup with iTunes

Troubleshooting