Retrieving WhatsApp Chats from Temporary Android Phone
- I'm in Costa Rica, nowhere near an Apple Store. My iPhone 8 had a short that made the battery run down very fast, plus its modem wasn't working so I could only use WiFi. Several places told me the phone couldn't be repaired, but I finally found someone who did the repair six months later. During this time I used a borrowed Android phone that now has data on it – specifically WhatsApp chats – that I want to transfer back to the iPhone. The automated WhatsApp support hasn't been much help with this, but it's now told me "Your iPhone must be factory new or reset to factory settings to pair with the Move to iOS app and move data from your Android phone". The iPhone isn't new, so I suppose I would have to wipe it and I don't want to do that. I could do a new backup of the iPhone, reset it and copy from the Android, but then I'd have the same problem restoring from the iPhone backup while not wanting to erase the copied Android data. There are photos as well as WhatsApp chats on the Android but I think I can handle these, so I'm specifically interested in transferring the WhatsApp chats from the Android without losing the ones on the iPhone. I understand I can import the Android chats as a separate set and then either have them separately or copy them manually to the main set, but I'd have to dig back in to find that procedure and I remember that I had some doubts about it when I read it before. Thanks for any help.
iPhone 8, iOS 16