[kirenida]

Regarding users creating new accounts on phone setup:

Recently I encountered a user that had created a new Google account when switching to a new device... on their last 5 devices.

So when they switched to the latest one and called me to set up the phone, I had to wrangle the contacts, photos, cloud storage and whatnot from all of those accounts.

Another pain point for me (in the EU/Balkans) is the transfer of Whatsapp and Viber. For reasons unknown, the accounts, contacts, chats, downloaded data can't be transferred during device setup. The only way to transfer data to a new device is to create a cloud backup on the old phone, which requires creating a wapp/viber account and setting up the google drive backup (local backup to a file? lol no. Any other cloud service available? lol no). Of course, when dealing with a media-heavy user (lots of photos, lots of memes/videos from group chats that are automatically downloaded to the phone), often is the case that the cloud storage tied to the google account doesn't have enough space for the backups, because it is filled with the automatic google photos backup that nobody turns off. And the user usually doesn't want to pay for extra space on Google because they don't understand why or just plainly don't want to.

So yeah, the transfer process is slow and complicated and full of traps, but it also offers an insight in to how much the imaginary "average consumer" doesn't care about this stuff and just agrees to everything offered.

[yonatan8070]

WhatsApp can do a local backup to /storage/emulated/0/Android/media/com.whatsapp

I have that set up, and Nextcloud syncs the folder to my server

[tsaika]

Yes, but WhatsApp is very finiky about restoring that backup when you're setting up a new device.

Due to this, I've resorted to backing up to drive without any media and then after restore, sync the media back via other means.

It's also worth mentioning that when you sync with drive, it doesn't preserve the time stamps of devices

[deng]

While this will backup all the media files, the chats themselves are encrypted and the key to decrypt them is not included with that backup. The key is in the data partition which you will not be able to access without rooting your phone.

[akaitea]

the WhatsApp chat transfer feature has worked for me many times https://faq.whatsapp.com/209942271778103/

for Viber I've only tried it via the backup on old phone and then restore that backup on the new phone

[wolvoleo]

You don't have to use the cloud transfer with WhatsApp. You can simply transfer the backup files manually before you do the first logon. They're in the media folder.

With Viber I don't know, I've never used that.

[deng]

> You don't have to use the cloud transfer with WhatsApp. You can simply transfer the backup files manually before you do the first logon. They're in the media folder.

This does not work anymore. The chats are encrypted and the key to decrypt them is not in the backup files.

[LtWorf]

> Another pain point for me (in the EU/Balkans) is the transfer of Whatsapp and Viber.

Telegram, due to not being e2e encrypted, is trivial to transfer, a new login does it.

[wolvoleo]

Yes but that's because the server has access to all your messages, they are not end to end encrypted.

It makes things a lot easier yes but you do give up a lot of privacy too.