For WhatsApp users on Android, 2024 is the year they’ll be like iPhone owners (thanks to this Google Drive change)

For WhatsApp users on Android, 2024 is the year they’ll be like iPhone owners (thanks to this Google Drive change)،

“In the coming months, if you choose to back up your WhatsApp chats on an Android device, your backup will begin to count toward your Google account storage limit.”

Remember this PSA? WhatsApp did this a while ago, since we covered it in mid-November (even though the rumors had been circulating for almost two years).

Now this is happening, as users who are part of WhatsApp's beta testing program are reporting that their chat and media backups are being counted toward their Google Drive storage limit (via Gizmochina). For free users, that's 15GB total (all shared for your Google Drive, Google Photos, and Gmail).

This is similar to what WhatsApp users on iPhone and iOS have been experiencing for years – the only difference is that the free cloud storage tier on iOS is limited to 5GB, not 15GB like Google's.

It is therefore expected that Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, will impose the backup storage change on all Android users during the first half of 2024. Users will receive a 30-day notification beforehand, displayed as a banner in the app's chat backup settings.

For those who don't want anything WhatsApp related to take up their Google Drive gigabytes, there are alternative options available:

You can make local backups and use the built-in WhatsApp Chat Transfer tool to seamlessly migrate your data to a new device.
You can also save space and backup only text messages, excluding media files.