How to export a WhatsApp chat on Android

Steps to export a chat on Android

1. Open WhatsApp and open the chat you want to export.
2. Tap the three-dot menu (⋮) in the top-right corner.
3. Tap More, then Export chat.
4. Choose “Include media” for a .zip with photos, videos and voice notes, or “Without media” for a smaller, text-only export.
5. Android shows a share sheet. Save it to Google Drive if you want it backed up off the phone, or choose Save to Downloads / a file manager so it lands directly on the device. Emailing it to yourself also works, though very large media exports may be too big for some mail providers.
6. Large chats with thousands of photos can take a minute or two to zip — let it finish rather than backing out of the share sheet early.

What the exported file looks like

Android's WhatsApp export uses a slightly different timestamp format from iPhone: 12/31/23, 9:41 PM - Sarah: See you at 6. Note the two-digit year, the AM/PM marker, and the dash instead of a colon after the timestamp. Chat to Evidence recognizes both the iPhone and Android formats automatically, so you don't need to tell it which phone the export came from.

If you chose “Without media,” attachments show up as placeholder lines like <Media omitted> or a filename reference, depending on your WhatsApp version. Choosing “Include media” instead gives you a .zip containing the .txt plus every photo and video named to match.

The message limit on Android exports

At the time of writing, WhatsApp on Android caps a media-included export at roughly the most recent 10,000 messages, and a text-only export at roughly the most recent 40,000 messages. If your chat history is longer than that, older messages simply won't be in the file — there's no warning dialog telling you this happened.

If you suspect you've hit this limit — for example the export starts partway through a conversation you know is older — export “Without media” to get the larger 40,000-message allowance, or split the review into date ranges by scrolling back and exporting from an earlier point if your WhatsApp version supports it. These thresholds are set by WhatsApp itself, not by Chat to Evidence, and Meta has changed them before, so treat the numbers as approximate.

Turning the export into a PDF

Once you have the .txt or .zip saved, open chattoevidence.com on the same phone or transfer the file to a computer and open it there — processing happens entirely in the browser, so nothing is uploaded either way. See WhatsApp chat to PDF for the conversion walkthrough, or WhatsApp chat to PDF with images if you exported media and want photos embedded rather than shown as placeholders.

For a chat you're preparing as evidence, WhatsApp chat to PDF for court covers what a clean, complete transcript needs to include.

Common problems

• Export chat isn't in the menu — confirm you're tapping the three-dot menu inside the chat itself, not the main chat list, and that WhatsApp is updated via the Play Store.
• The .zip is too large to email — save it to Google Drive or transfer it to a computer via USB or a file-transfer app instead.
• Messages seem to be missing from the start — check the message-limit note above; a text-only export usually recovers more history than a media export.
• Dates look off by a day or in the wrong order — Android formats the date using your phone's regional settings, so double-check whether it's month/day or day/month before assuming something's wrong; the PDF tool has a toggle to fix this.