Evidence for both changes is appearing in the latest betas
WhatsApp is constantly pushing new beta builds out to testers to try out upcoming features. Recently we’ve seen work towards abilities like letting you edit sent messages and an undo option for deleted chats. Now it looks like the next on the horizon could be a couple that allow us to export WhatsApp data and view status updates in the chats section.
In January, we first saw evidence that WhatsApp could lose its free Google backups, and they’d start counting against your storage sometime in the future. Now it seems that the company is developing a feature to export backed-up data stored in Google Drive, reports WABetaInfo. The newly released 2.22.13.11 beta starts work on an option at the bottom of the backup settings screen to export WhatsApp data from Google Drive. Correspondingly, there should also be an option that imports the same data back.
Meanwhile, a renovation to status updates is being tested, first spotted by WABetaInfo in the 2.22.13.9 build. Users will be able to access status updates from the chat list itself. Currently, one needs to click on the “status” column next to “chats” to view individual or group chat updates. This new way to access them would be similar to status updates on Instagram, which, like WhatsApp itself, is owned by Meta.
The new look for status updates first appeared in a WhatsApp desktop beta, and now it looks like Android could be getting it next. The backup changes are probably going to be more impactful, but for now we don’t have a great sense of when either change might start going live for everybody. Google Drive users have a free storage limit of 15GB per account, and backing up WhatsApp data without the ability to cleanly export could take up a nice chunk of that — we hope that export option arrives soon enough.
