[kirenida]

Regarding users creating new accounts on phone setup:

Recently I encountered a user that had created a new Google account when switching to a new device... on their last 5 devices.

So when they switched to the latest one and called me to set up the phone, I had to wrangle the contacts, photos, cloud storage and whatnot from all of those accounts.

Another pain point for me (in the EU/Balkans) is the transfer of Whatsapp and Viber. For reasons unknown, the accounts, contacts, chats, downloaded data can't be transferred during device setup. The only way to transfer data to a new device is to create a cloud backup on the old phone, which requires creating a wapp/viber account and setting up the google drive backup (local backup to a file? lol no. Any other cloud service available? lol no). Of course, when dealing with a media-heavy user (lots of photos, lots of memes/videos from group chats that are automatically downloaded to the phone), often is the case that the cloud storage tied to the google account doesn't have enough space for the backups, because it is filled with the automatic google photos backup that nobody turns off. And the user usually doesn't want to pay for extra space on Google because they don't understand why or just plainly don't want to.

So yeah, the transfer process is slow and complicated and full of traps, but it also offers an insight in to how much the imaginary "average consumer" doesn't care about this stuff and just agrees to everything offered.

[yonatan8070]

WhatsApp can do a local backup to /storage/emulated/0/Android/media/com.whatsapp

I have that set up, and Nextcloud syncs the folder to my server

[tsaika]

Yes, but WhatsApp is very finiky about restoring that backup when you're setting up a new device.

Due to this, I've resorted to backing up to drive without any media and then after restore, sync the media back via other means.

It's also worth mentioning that when you sync with drive, it doesn't preserve the time stamps of devices

[eMPee584]

As usual, root and sshfs make this all a lot more bearable. Alas, no online-banking or digital health insurance services, lol.

[deng]

While this will backup all the media files, the chats themselves are encrypted and the key to decrypt them is not included with that backup. The key is in the data partition which you will not be able to access without rooting your phone.

[akaitea]

the WhatsApp chat transfer feature has worked for me many times https://faq.whatsapp.com/209942271778103/

for Viber I've only tried it via the backup on old phone and then restore that backup on the new phone

[wolvoleo]

You don't have to use the cloud transfer with WhatsApp. You can simply transfer the backup files manually before you do the first logon. They're in the media folder.

With Viber I don't know, I've never used that.

[deng]

> You don't have to use the cloud transfer with WhatsApp. You can simply transfer the backup files manually before you do the first logon. They're in the media folder.

This does not work anymore. The chats are encrypted and the key to decrypt them is not in the backup files.

[wolvoleo]

I did it only a few weeks ago. They are indeed encrypted but it seems to retrieve the key from WhatsApp itself.

They wouldn't be much good as a backup if there was no way to read them of course.

[deng]

I tried the exact same thing a few weeks ago with a de-googled phone and it did not work. I had to transfer the /data/data/com.whatsapp folder as well via root access, then it restored the chats (the display of the old phone was dead and hence I couldn't initiate any kind of account transfer to a new phone).

[wolvoleo]

Weird, for me it worked fine. I didn't need to transfer the root parts. Nor did I do anything else on the old phone. I just signed in on the new one with the backups in place.

I don't use Google services or an account either, though I do have Google play installed.

[LtWorf]

> Another pain point for me (in the EU/Balkans) is the transfer of Whatsapp and Viber.

Telegram, due to not being e2e encrypted, is trivial to transfer, a new login does it.

[wolvoleo]

Yes but that's because the server has access to all your messages, they are not end to end encrypted.

It makes things a lot easier yes but you do give up a lot of privacy too.

[eMPee584]

The server, and plausibly at least one secret service. Telegram datacenters are located in Florida, Amsterdam and Singapure.. guess local jurisdiction applies.

[LtWorf]

I am 100% convinced that whatsapp has backdoors and so I might as well just use the convenient one.