In January 2021, WhatsApp did something definitely stupid to lose millions of users by updating their Privacy Policy which sort of suggested that they might share your personal info like chat messages to their parent company, the one and only, Facebook Inc.
The policy roughly suggested that companies like Instagram, WhatsApp can use Facebook-hosted services to store and manage the data generated by these platforms. It might seem like it’s harmless but hidden under these words WhatsApp can manipulate words to do whatever they want. This created an uproar among millions of users across the world. So, WhatsApp users started looking for alternative options like Signal or Telegram, etc.,
We have to credit Elon Musk’s infamous tweet for bringing Signal to become the top free app in the App Store. One major hinderance in terms of people moving from WhatsApp to Signal is that nobody wants to leave their chats behind in WhatsApp.
How to import chats from whatsapp to signal
Signal has created new features that lets to move your chats from Whatsapp to Signal seamlessly with a few taps, no fuss. Here are the steps to actually move your chats to Signal.
- Open the WhatsApp chat which you would love to export to Signal app. There is no way to actually import all chats at the same time currently. But the export option available in individual chats could be used to actually move past messages to the desired app of choice.
- Tap on the name at the chat window. This would open up the window with a list of options. Scroll down to the bottom and tap on Export Chat below Share Contact.
- Once you hit that, you would see a popup with options to Attach Media or without media as you can see in the screenshot below. Choose the appropriate option that you need.
- This would open the Share window in iOS where you could choose where you want the exported chat messages to be sent. In the window that appears, the first section would be your recent contacts. In the second section, you would see the list of apps that would actually receive the data. Look for Signal in the list. If not found, scroll to the end of it and tap on the three dots which would open the list of all the apps that supports and look for Signal. Ideally, you would find it at the bottom of the list.
- Once you tap on the Signal app you would be shown a popup called Choose Recipients with the list of all the possible chats in the Signal app. I’m assuming that you have downloaded, installed and set up the Signal app. Choose the name of the chat you want the messages to be moved to.
- Once you have selected the name of the chat, (ideally would be the name of the contact whose chat we exported back in WhatsApp) you would be asked to hit send in the message that would be sent to the person. As you can see the name of the contact is even added to the file. You could also see the file size there.
- Tap on the Send button (Blue one) at the bottom right corner of the screen. The file starts uploading and then sent to the contact you have selected. Make sure to select the correct contact.
- The contact would be sent a message with the text file that contains all the chat messages from WhatsApp as you can see below. Tapping on that would open the file preview.
- Once you are there, if you want to read the contents of the file i.e., you could choose Preview Content. This would ideally open the file and since it’s a txt file you would see text messages.
- As you can see, you can tap on the txt file and see all the old chat messages. This might not seem ideal at the moment, but this is all we want. We just need a copy of old messages in the Signal app.
This is the best option you have as of now to export the messages from WhatsApp chat to Signal messages. I personally wish there would be a feature similar to what Telegram has done using the same export feature.
Telegram definitely does a better job of actually placing the chat messages along with the messages in the Telelgram chats. We can hope that Signal would do the same in the coming future.
We can give Signal benefit of the doubt since its a non profit trying to create a privacy focused instant messaging platform. Even through the surge of users in the last month, they have managed to stay afloat and have brought a bunch of features that a large amount of users would enjoy. From what I have heard, they have expanded the team to make sure the user demands are met.
