According to reports, WhatsApp has begun to discontinue support for unlimited chat backups on Google Drive for users who have signed up to receive beta updates for the popular messaging app.
The platform will no longer provide free cloud storage for Android smartphone users, as it does for iOS users. While the change is now only affecting beta testers, the Meta-owned messaging platform is expected to withdraw free Google Drive storage for all Android smartphone users in the next weeks or months.
WhatsApp has begun to drop support for unlimited chat backups on Google Drive for Android beta testers. The application will display a banner in its settings under Chats > Chat backup telling users that the modifications will take effect in 30 days.
The modification may be being rolled out in batches to testers; LoudFact was unable to reproduce the notification on WhatsApp for Android after switching to the newest beta version from the Play Store.
Last November, WhatsApp and Google announced the end of unlimited chat backups via Google Drive for Android users. According to the messaging platform’s roadmap, the move was supposed to go live for beta testers in December and for all users in the first half of 2024.
Beta testers who are affected by the change will see a banner telling them that chat backups will no longer count against their Google Drive storage capacity after a month.
The increased storage policy comes five years after WhatsApp and Google began offering unlimited chat backups that did not take up space on Google Drive – the company offers 15GB of free storage for all customers, which is more than Apple and Microsoft, both of which offer 5GB of free cloud storage.
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This isn’t Google’s first attempt to limit access to free storage on its cloud services. Three years after the phones were released, the firm discontinued support for unlimited “original” photo backups for Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL owners in February 2022.
In 2020, the company discontinued support for unlimited and free photo backups for all users, claiming that it had over a billion users at the time, with over 4 trillion uploads and 28 billion weekly uploads from users.