[Aerroon]

Sure, but wouldn't you want to have control over these backups yourself? Not only do you get increased privacy from it, you also won't be in for a nasty surprise when the service decides to remove old logs/stop doing business.

[ximeng]

Of course you want to have control. So why does whatsapp and others do their best to prevent this?

[greatgib]

So that explains why chat history has value in itself without just storing outside the important info on a given moment.

But sure, the best thing to deal with that is to be able to 'backup/export' your history and also being able open/import it in a usable form.

Whatsapp mostly fails on both topics. You can't easily backup, otherwise it would be stored in clear in google drive, in an area that is not even accessible to you.

And then it is a sqlite db with proprietary format for fields, so so far nothing can display it properly offline.

For telegram, they have a good export/backup feature.

I don't know of anytool that would allow to browse your history nicely when loaded offline from backups, but as the format is open, that should be doable.

[Erlich_Bachman]

An average user doesn't commonly want to have control over anything themselves :P.

[joe-collins]

I disagree. They'd love to have control, but that control requires tech sophistication that none of the current tooling adequately elides.

[beagle3]

They surely love to have the possibility (and illusion) of control, they don't actually care much for the control itself.

There are numerous marketing studies that show people are most content when choices are made for them (e.g. in getting a new washing machine), as long as they know (or at least believe) they could have made another choice if they wanted to.