WhatsApp could allow in the future to customize chat backups by choosing whether or not to include various categories of multimedia content, such as photos, audio, video, documents and other media.
The news appeared in the latest beta of the app distributed on the Play Store, version number 2.21.21.7, in circulation since last night; it is hidden, but the guys from WABetaInfo managed to activate it and capture an image, which we propose below.
As usual, it is impossible to tell how long it will take for distribution on the stable channel: as we know Facebook’s messaging platform prefers to take its time and make sure it does things right.
More flexibility is always convenient, but there could be a very specific reason behind the choice of WhatsApp, and that is that the backups of the service could soon affect, at least partially, the available space of your Google account.
Each Google account offers 15 GB of unified cloud space, which can be used by all services (Drive, Gmail, Photos and so on). The user can then expand the space according to their needs with the paid plans called Google One.
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At present, every WhatsApp backup uploaded to Google Drive is not counted. You can upload a 40GB backup but your free space doesn’t drop one bit. However, it is rumored that Google intends to terminate this privilege in the future, at least partially: the idea is that the first 2 GB will always be free, the following ones will not.
It is fair, for context, to observe that the consumption of data in the mobile world has grown dramatically, above all thanks to the increasing diffusion of videos, voice messages and other multimedia contents, and therefore it is reasonable to assume that even WhatsApp backups have risen in an important way.
And by calculating the spread of the platform, which has long since surpassed two billion users, it is easy to imagine that these are huge amounts of data. It is also worth mentioning that Google stopped offering unlimited photo and video backups to Photos just a few months ago.
As we said, the novelty was discovered on the Android client; It is unclear whether it will also arrive on iOS – assuming of course that it is eventually released.