WhatsApp may have given its users a stay of execution till May to agree to the privacy policy but that hasn’t stopped it’s competitors from taking advantage of the situation. Telegram and Signal have been on an upward track after WhatsApp’s controversial privacy policy with users for both hitting all-time highs. The former has taken more of an advantage than the latter according to reports that Telegram may soon allow users to import their WhatsApp chats.
The discovery was made in Telegram’s most recent update for iOS and the tool allowed users to move their chat history from not only WhatsApp but Line and KakaoTalk as well.
The export tool is pretty simple to use and it only requires the user on WhatsApp to select chat export. As the above image shows when this is done on iOS there is an option to export the chats to Telegram.
You can open this file in Telegram’s share sheet and import the chats to a private or group chat. The WhatsApp chats exported to Telegram are marked as thus whenever they are shared.
Telegram rolled this feature back
In a report by iPhone Hacks, the feature has been removed by Telegram. This suggests that the company is still working on the feature and may be looking to improve it in for a full roll-out.
One thing that we can be sure of is WhatsApp responding to this. It will be interesting to see if they combat this by simply blocking Telegram from being a chat export destination or if it will roll out a number of features to persuade users to stay.
The one thing that would work in my opinion is giving users the option to opt-out of the privacy policy. All of WhatsApp’s competitors will have a difficult time innovating around that but reversing the privacy policy course is unlikely to happen.
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