Home > News

Switch from iOS to Android 12 and Transfer WhatsApp Conversations

By Laura Tucker
Android 12 Whatsapp Featured

It can be daunting to switch operating systems and platforms, whether on a computer or a smartphone. Google has added an ability to make the whole process easier on Android 12 when switching from iOS. Now you can easily transfer all your messages to an Android 12 phone, even your WhatsApp conversations.

Also read: How to Use WhatsApp Web and WhatsApp Desktop in 2026

Transferring WhatsApp Conversations to Android 12

With the recent Android 12 release, Google said, “We want to make this process easier,” of switching from an iPhone to an Android phone. Google added an ability to transfer all important information by connecting your existing iPhone to a new Android with a USB-C-to-Lightning cable.

Once you give your permission, “Android matches and installs the same apps from Google Play.” It also allows you to transfer your SMS and iMessage chat history. This is in addition to your photos, videos, contacts, calendars, and more.

Android 12 Whatsapp Transfer

Once you connect the two phones, you’ll be prompted during the setup process to scan a QR code with your iPhone. This launches WhatsApp on your new Android phone.

Google said its team worked “hand-in-hand with WhatsApp to ensure your data remains protected throughout the transfer process” to your Android phone. The goal is to ensure “no one else can ever access your WhatsApp information and files.”

Your entire WhatsApp chat history will copy from your iPhone to your new Android. Throughout the process, receiving new messages is halted to be sure new messages aren’t received during the transfer.

Also read: How to Save a Friend’s Whatsapp Status on Android

Availability

At this point, the option to safely transfer WhatsApp conversations and other information and files from iOS isn’t available for all Android 12 devices. It’s limited to Samsung Galaxy devices and all Pixel phones. However, there are plans for it to eventually be available on all new Android 12 phones.

Android 12 Whatsapp Phone

The goal, according to Google, is that you “never lose what’s most important to you when making the switch.”

Google further claims, “There’s never been a better time to switch to Android.”

This, of course, puts the onus on Apple to apply a similar easy process to transfer in the reverse: from Android to iOS. But it could even be something already in the works, as we’re working in an age that allows you to use Android apps on Windows and iOS on macOS. Then again, there is bad blood between WhatsApp’s parent company, Facebook, and Apple.

If you’re looking for a way to do that now, however, read our iCareFone Transfer review to learn how to transfer from Android to iOS and WhatsApp’s plans to devise a method to transfer from Android to iOS.

Also read: How to Export and Back Up Your WhatsApp Chat History

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.