WhatsApp integrates Google Drive to make sure you never lose your photos

“And every month, almost a billion people use WhatsApp to do just that”. When you have more than 900 million users, the rollout of big new features tends to take a while. WhatsApp tends to like to have feature parity all around, so we would expect the backup option to hit iOS. The standard service of the application only provided users with local backup, thus its usefulness was rather limited. Google Drive offers them a native, seamless and safe way to back up their multimedia in the cloud, with added security thanks to encryption. This is a particularly long one – Google says the feature will become available over the next few months.

Google announced the new option today; obviously, it is only available to Android users.

While WhatsApp requires regular back-up of chats, Telegram automatically saves all messages so users do not have to bother with old messages when they change phones. Now you don’t have to – if you use Android, at least. Now, once you create a backup with Google Drive, you can restore everything on a new device with just a couple taps. “Starred messages also appear in their own section in search results”. After confirming your phone number, WhatsApp will check your local storage (in the WhatsApp folder) for any backups.

Of course, something always has to go wrong. Users will now be able to “star” a message. And in Android 6.0 Marshmallow, Google has a new auto backup feature that apps can utilize.

The whole process is definitely an improvement, but there are clearly still a few kinks to be worked out. This is the version that is hosted on WhatsApp’s website, but it is not the version hosted on the Play Store. Be sure to turn off automatic updates for a while if you manage to upgrade to 2.12.303.