WhatsApp Android users may have to start paying for Google Drive chat back-up

Google is reportedly planning to stop offering the unlimited plan to store WhatsApp back-ups. Picture: Dado Ruvic

Google is reportedly planning to stop offering the unlimited plan to store WhatsApp back-ups. Picture: Dado Ruvic

Published Feb 13, 2022

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Free WhatsApp back-ups onto Google cloud storage may soon become a thing of the past for Android smartphone users.

WhatsApp’s back-up feature saves users’ messages to their phone’s memory daily or, depending on specific settings, on Google Drive.

The platform also has a new feature under development that allows users to manage WhatsApp chats when the messages backed up on Google Drive. This means that users could be able to exclude certain message types from the back-up, in order to save space on the cloud.

Google is also reportedly planning to stop offering the unlimited plan to store WhatsApp back-ups. While awaiting on more data and evidence of this, the messenger app initially preferred to mark the news as a rumour until it was concluded to be true.

According to WABetaInfo, the plans to introduce changes for back-ups also include notifications about when Google Drive is almost full, when the limit is reached, and information about when the changes take effect.

Google will still offer a certain quota to store WhatsApp back-ups for free, but it will be a limited plan, and information about the new storage plan is unknown right now.

The messaging platform is also planning to move its broadcast lists to another part of the app at a future update.

A different post from WABetaInfo post said that WhatsApp is planning to remove “broadcast lists” and “new group” from the chats list in a future update.

IOL TECH

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