How to export your WhatsApp chat history (iPhone & Android)

By Michael, founder of ChatAttic · September 2026 · 7 min read

WhatsApp has a built-in Export chat feature that hands you a plain, readable copy of a conversation — the messages as text, and optionally the photos and videos alongside them. It's the one reliable way to get your chats out of the app and into files you control. Here's exactly how to do it on both phones, what you actually get, and where WhatsApp's own export quietly falls short.

What "Export chat" gives you

Export chat produces a small, open bundle — nothing proprietary:

• A .txt transcript of the conversation: every message on its own line, prefixed with the date, time and sender name, in the order they were sent. You can open it in any text editor on any computer.
• If you choose Attach Media, the whole thing arrives as a .zip containing that .txt plus the photos, videos, voice notes and documents from the chat, with the transcript pointing to each file by name.

That's the entire format: readable text and ordinary media files. No database, no login, nothing that expires. It's yours the moment it lands.

Exporting on iPhone

On iOS, the option lives inside the conversation itself:

1. Open the chat or group you want to keep.
2. Tap the contact or group name at the top to open its info screen.
3. Scroll to the bottom and tap Export Chat.
4. Choose Without Media (the .txt transcript only, quick and small) or Attach Media (the .zip with photos and videos — larger, but complete).
5. Pick where it goes from the share sheet — Save to Files is the cleanest choice, or mail it to yourself. Repeat for each conversation you care about.

Exporting on Android

On Android the steps are almost identical, just reached through the menu:

1. Open the chat or group.
2. Tap the ⋮ (three-dot) menu in the top-right corner.
3. Tap More, then Export chat.
4. Choose Without media or Include media.
5. Send it somewhere you'll find it again — Save to Drive, your Files app, or your own email. Do the same for every thread worth keeping.

Whichever phone you're on, once the file is off the device and onto a computer you're on solid ground: it's a normal .txt or .zip you can copy, back up, and read years from now.

The limits nobody warns you about

WhatsApp's export is genuinely useful, but it's built for sharing a chat, not archiving your life — and it shows:

• Roughly 40,000 messages per export without media, and far fewer with it (often only the most recent few hundred to a couple of thousand items once photos and videos are attached). A long-running group can silently export only its tail.
• It's one chat at a time. There's no "export everything" button — every conversation is a separate trip through the menu and the share sheet.
• The files pile up and overlap. Export the same chat twice and you get two .txt files that mostly repeat each other. Do this across a few phones and old backups and you end up with a download folder no human wants to sort by hand.

Turning the exports into an archive you own

A folder of .txt files and media .zips isn't an archive yet — it's raw material. The work is stitching them into one clean, readable record with nothing duplicated and nothing lost. Done by hand that means:

1. Unzip every media bundle and keep each transcript with its photos and videos.
2. De-duplicate at the message level, so two overlapping exports of the same chat collapse into one copy of each message rather than two.
3. Group everything by conversation and sort by time, so a thread you exported three times from two phones reads as a single continuous history.
4. Store it all in plain files you can open, search, and hand down.