Skip to main content

Google may end unlimited WhatsApp backup size on Android soon

Android users have an advantage regarding WhatsApp backups, as their size is not calculated from the size of the Google Drive storage, which means that they get unlimited storage space to keep these backups, but it seems that this will not last long.

 WhatsApp Backups enable users to retrieve their conversations with all their contents of text messages, voice messages, photos, and videos, when moving to a new phone or when deleting and reinstalling the application. 

For iPhone users, these backups are stored in iCloud, and their size is included in the free 5 GB that Apple gives to users. When this space is full, users must either delete some items stored in iCloud or switch to a paid iCloud Plus plan to continue backing up WhatsApp chats. 

For Android users, it's different. In 2018, WhatsApp made a deal with Google under which the size of WhatsApp backups will be excluded from the free 15 GB that Google gives to users, and thus Android users will get unlimited storage space for WhatsApp backups. In return, WhatsApp backups that haven't been updated in over a year are automatically removed from Google Drive under this deal.

Now, WABetaInfo, a WhatsApp under-development features tracker website, has discovered some lines of code in a recent beta version of WhatsApp that shows an upcoming change in how backups size is counted. 

When this change is ready and WhatsApp officially announces it, a notification will appear informing the user of a change in the backup copies in WhatsApp and when this change will take effect, and Google will move from granting unlimited space for these backups to a limited plan of 2000 MB per user (according to the same website) dedicated for WhatsApp Backups.When the user is close to filling the storage space, he will receive a notification in this regard.

 WhatsApp is also working on a tool that enables managing the size of backup copies by allowing users to exclude some items such as videos, documents, and others from backups to reduce their size. 

There is still no additional information or any official announcement about when this change will take effect, nor about what will happen when the user fills the 2000 MB space allocated for WhatsApp backups, but it is certainly here, that Google intends to take this step to push more users to upgrade to a Google One paid plan.

 This is not something new, the company has previously done a similar thing in Google Photos, where it is now calculating the size of photos and videos from the free 15 GB storage space that it gives to users, and in any case, we will have to wait until the official announcement of this change, to discover All its details and the effects it will have on users.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

DEKUVE Colors 0.1 is a beautiful and promising Linux distro based on Debian

As we said in a previous article, the most important characteristic of GNU Linux operating systems is its versatility, as there is a Linux distribution for everything and every taste and all types and specifications of hardware, it is an operating system that you can run in everything, whatever it is or is. Most of these distributions are derived or based from one of these parent distributions: Debian (like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, MX Linux...), Arch Linux (like Manjaro, EndeavourOS, Garuda Linux...), and Red Hat Enterprise Linux aka RHEL (like Fedora, CentOS, ClearOS...).  These derivative distributions are also divided into two types: the first one, where developers take the base of one of the other Linux distributions and build their distribution on it, by adding their packages and desktop environment, such as a Linux Mint distribution, for example, which develops the Cinnamon desktop interface and uses it in its main release, or uses a desktop interface already exists as Manjaro do, whi

Deepin Linux 20.2.2 Released With A Brand-New App Store, Android Apps Support, And More

The developers of the Chinese distribution of GNU Linux, Deepin, based on the stable version of Debian, announced the availability of a new version of the most beautiful distribution in the Linux world.  Deepin OS version 20.2.2 brings a set of new features and bug fixes for various components and components of the operating system to improve system consistency and stability and enhanced the overall user experience.  As usual for most Chinese projects, despite its useful features and beautiful design, Deepin Linux distribution suffers from a partial lack of translation into foreign languages, so we find some core operating system applications and components are in the Chinese language, and this is unfortunate, and we hope to be fixed in the Next versions of this beautiful Linux distro.  The first great and new feature in Deepin Linux 20.2.2, is that the OS comes now with Secure Boot support.  Secure Boot is a security standard developed by members of the PC industry to help ensure that

Rufus 3.18 Beta Adds The Bypass Of Windows 11 Restrictions To In-place Upgrades

A new beta version of the Rufus installation images burning tool was recently released with several new features, the most important of which is the ability to bypass Windows 11 restrictions for in-place upgrades. Rufus is a free and open-source tool that helps create bootable USB flash drives from ISO images. It supports most Linux distributions, in addition to Windows, and to MS-DOS compatible operating systems. This tool supports burning Windows installation images, from Windows XP SP2 and above, including the recently released Windows 11. After the release of Windows 11, Microsoft announced an update to the minimum specifications required to install the new system, the most important of which is that the computer must have a modern processor, TPM 2.0, and it must support secure boot too, to be compatible with Windows 11.  Many users did not like this, which made Microsoft allow Windows 11 to be installed on non-compatible devices by making some modifications in the system registry.