Android users have an advantage regarding WhatsApp backups, as their size is not calculated from the size of the Google Drive storage, which means that they get unlimited storage space to keep these backups, but it seems that this will not last long.
WhatsApp Backups enable users to retrieve their conversations with all their contents of text messages, voice messages, photos, and videos, when moving to a new phone or when deleting and reinstalling the application.
For iPhone users, these backups are stored in iCloud, and their size is included in the free 5 GB that Apple gives to users. When this space is full, users must either delete some items stored in iCloud or switch to a paid iCloud Plus plan to continue backing up WhatsApp chats.
For Android users, it's different. In 2018, WhatsApp made a deal with Google under which the size of WhatsApp backups will be excluded from the free 15 GB that Google gives to users, and thus Android users will get unlimited storage space for WhatsApp backups. In return, WhatsApp backups that haven't been updated in over a year are automatically removed from Google Drive under this deal.
Now, WABetaInfo, a WhatsApp under-development features tracker website, has discovered some lines of code in a recent beta version of WhatsApp that shows an upcoming change in how backups size is counted.
When this change is ready and WhatsApp officially announces it, a notification will appear informing the user of a change in the backup copies in WhatsApp and when this change will take effect, and Google will move from granting unlimited space for these backups to a limited plan of 2000 MB per user (according to the same website) dedicated for WhatsApp Backups.When the user is close to filling the storage space, he will receive a notification in this regard.
WhatsApp is also working on a tool that enables managing the size of backup copies by allowing users to exclude some items such as videos, documents, and others from backups to reduce their size.
There is still no additional information or any official announcement about when this change will take effect, nor about what will happen when the user fills the 2000 MB space allocated for WhatsApp backups, but it is certainly here, that Google intends to take this step to push more users to upgrade to a Google One paid plan.
This is not something new, the company has previously done a similar thing in Google Photos, where it is now calculating the size of photos and videos from the free 15 GB storage space that it gives to users, and in any case, we will have to wait until the official announcement of this change, to discover All its details and the effects it will have on users.
