Over the years of using WhatsApp, we are either strict when it comes to cleanliness or It is likely that we will end up accumulating several gigabytes of history between messages, images, videos and more. In my case, I admit to being somewhat prone to Diogenes syndrome in its digital version, I just checked and my complete file, in which I keep conversations from over 10 years ago, easily exceeds eight gigabytes, in After quite a few communications of this type i don’t use whatsapp but telegram so their size could be much bigger otherwise.

A very important feature of WhatsApp, especially for those of us who like to keep a file of the conversation and protect it from possible malfunctions of the smartphone on which we use it. is a backup. With it, as its name suggests, we can back up regularly. This backup is stored in the cloud by default for the operating system we use, that is, in the case of iOS in iCloud and for Android devices in Google Drive.

Until now, users have had the exclusive benefit of the latter, which is that backups are uploaded to their Google Account storage did not subtract your size from the space available for your accounts. This means that even if you had a free account with the required 15 gigabytes and the WhatsApp backup took up 20 gigabytes, there was no problem. This is not the case with Apple, the space taken up by the cloud backup is deducted from the total iCloud Drive space of the user account.

As you can see in this picture, I was not exaggerating when I talked about the size of my WhatsApp file.

This difference ends, and unfortunately, not to the benefit of iOS users, but to the detriment of Android users. As we can read on the help pages of the operating system, Google will stop offering free unlimited hosting for WhatsApp backups on Android. And that’s a change that will start happening sooner rather than later, so all potentially affected users should start considering their options.

The deadlines, as I say, are not long. Specifically for WhatsApp beta users on Android, this change will be applied next month, December 2023while its reach to all WhatsApp users on Android will start appearing from early next year. There are no specific dates at this time.

As stated earlier, free Google accounts offer a total of 15 gigabytes which, yes, are distributed among email, Google Drive, Google Docs, etc., so it will be necessary to check the available space and check if there is enough space for the WhatsApp backup. Otherwise, we can only expand the capacity of the account (which of course means logging out) or stop creating backup copies with the risks that this entails.