14 DAY TRIAL // For WhatsApp users, moving from iPhone to Android or the other way around is quite a headache, as their conversations are lost because the messaging platform does not support cross-platform synchronization.
In other words, as WhatsApp is built right now, you can only have your chats synced between iPhones and between Android devices, but other than that, your conversations don’t roam between devices running different operating systems.
As recently discovered by WABetaInfo, WhatsApp is working on fixing this, and it looks like the company is already testing such functionality in beta builds of its mobile clients.
As it turns out, the new feature would be tied to another important update that WhatsApp is working on. Earlier this year, it was discovered that the Facebook-owned company would allow users to connect more than just one device to one account, which means that you should be able to use both an iPhone and an Android device with the same phone number on WhatsApp.
Already in limited testing stage
When this happens, the chat history would thus be saved on both devices, and to make the whole thing possible, WhatsApp is developing a sync feature that would have all messages sent to the devices that are configured per each phone number.
This is how the same conversation history would end up roaming across devices regardless of their operating systems. Needless to say, WhatsApp is paying particular attention to the security of the whole thing, so it’s using encryption keys that are automatically changed whenever you add a new device in your account.
A notification shows up in the conversation window, just like it typically happens today when your contact changes the device that they’re using for connecting to WhatsApp.
At this point, there’s no ETA as to when the new feature is supposed to go live, but it’s already in early beta and obviously shouldn’t take too long before it goes live for more testers.