Google today announced that WhatsApp on Android — the popular messaging platform Facebook acquired a couple years back for $19 billion— is integrating the ability to backup content directly to Google Drive from within the app. That means that WhatsApp users will be able to quickly make a secure backup of their chat history, voice messages, photos, and videos and have it accessible from their Google accounts.
WhatsApp has over 900M users, a majority of whom are on Android devices. Google Drive offers them a native, seamless and safe way to back up their multimedia in the cloud, with added security thanks to encryption. This new feature also allows WhatsApp users to restore their content on a new mobile device in a couple of easy steps… “Google Drive was an easy choice. It offers the native Android experience we want for our users and the scale to grow with us.” — Brian Acton, Co-founder WhatsApp
Users will see the option appear in the WhatsApp settings where they’ll be able to connect to their Google Drive account to save a backup (pictured above). They’ll also be able to set a frequency for automatic backups (daily, weekly, monthly, etc), and whether or not to include videos in the backup.
The feature takes advantage of Google’s Drive APIs that let developers offer users the ability to backup user data to their Google Drive accounts. And in Android 6.0 Marshmallow, Google has a new auto backup feature that apps can utilize.
Google noted that the feature would roll out for users over the next few months.
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