Incredibly, I cannot find out how to do this. The internet is full of stuff (much clickbait, too) on how to transfer all WA messages from one to the other (one method uses a cable and QR code scanning) as if e.g. replacing an Iphone with an Android one, but I just want to export the one conversation, and them import into an android phone.
All descriptions I can find of the cable method (method #3 here) will transfer everything. That is too risky to even try it.
The source Iphone (which I don’t have to hand) doesn’t seem to list any options for the backup destination. It should show e.g. Whatsapp itself, Files, Email, etc, but actually as soon as the user selects whether to add or not add media, it seems to just start an Export, which goes to a mysterious location.
I know from doing Export Chat under android is that the export is a load of files. Each image is a jpeg, and then there is a txt file containing all the text. Ideally this should be zipped, obviously, but under android I can select a dropbox folder so it doesn’t matter (you make sure it is empty first). Under android you get loads of export options… I suspect there is a config under IOS WA → Settings where you might specify export options, but I don’t have the phone to hand.
Maybe an IOS WA user can confirm?
This is an Iphone 7 so probably some older IOS version.
Does nobody here have Whatsapp on an Iphone?
I got this from someone:
The export chat option within WhatsApp works like any other iOS sharing feature. You get to select another app or contact where you want to send the data. I just selected the mail app and it created an email with a 20MB zip file containing a text file of the entire chat history and all of the images, media as separate files.
so the Q becomes: is it possible to have an Iphone configured with no destinations?
Apparently not:
If it is running WhatsApp then at least WhatsApp will be offered as a destination so the user should be able to just send the zip to somebody as another WhatsApp user
You can export any chat with or without media to another app within the iOS eco system. Dropbox, iCloud or any other cloud storage platform for example. It’s a zip file which contains the images as separate files and a text file for the chat.
Perhaps you can test the export function by going into a chat and share a random photo from a chat. This should give you the exact export (sharing) locations as for a backup file.
I have exported the conversation from the Iphone to a zipfile. This zipfile now resides on the Android (14) phone.
The next step – importing a conversation into WA from a zipfile – is a mystery. There is a ton of stuff on google but none of it works. All of it refers to a directory called Whatsapp in “the root folder” (which of course isn’t actually a root folder, and anyway this is not a rooted device) which is shown in screenshots to be the same directory as the one in which e.g. DCIM is seen. That directory does not exist in that location, on either android 12 or android 14, but is not too hard to find.
The zipfile content is obvious. It is the text of the chat (as a simple .txt file, with tags in it) and then the media (mostly .jpg). But how does one import it? The web is packed with clickbait offering various import tools but none work, and some require you to uninstall WA first (suggesting that they are for a fresh phone where you are importing everything new.
I found the WA data structure here
Media contains literally the conversation media e.g. jpegs.
Backups and Databases contain this sort of stuff
I have been told that the database is a SQlite database.
So while it would be easy enough to just dump the media into the Media directory, it won’t get linked into the database to form the conversation, and there is nowhere to drop the .txt file which contains the text. The text is prob99 held within the database, with the images stored separately, which is the usual way with databases.
It’s really stupid to be encrypting the text but not encrypting the media but I guess nobody has realised this yet 
It seems clear that there is no way to import the Export file back into WA. What a dumb design this app is… you can export but can’t import.
There are lots of viewers like this but that one is a js app which I have no idea how to run on a phone or PC. Maybe a browser can run it. He has hosted an online viewer here but that does only the text. The text contains links to media files so it would be fairly trivial to add those but he strips off the text lines containing the links.
This one does media too, simply by using the system viewer. And here is an online version; not sure if the code is the same. This works OK on a PC and poorly on a phone.
