New Delhi: Unlimited WhatsApp backups on Google Drive could soon become a thing of the past soon, according to new code strings discovered by WABetaInfo. The new code strings hint at Meta-owned WhatsApp losing the unlimited Google Drive storage feature. While iOS users have a limited amount of storage for WhatsApp on their Apple devices, Android users get unlimited storage for the messaging platform on Google Drive.
Perhaps taking a queue from Apple, Google Drive may end the unlimited plan to store backups on it, noted WABetaInfo. "If you use WhatsApp on Android, you already know that your backups don’t count against your Google Drive storage quota after an agreement between WhatsApp and Google some years ago. This is a very good advantage for Android users since Apple doesn’t offer an unlimited plan to store backups on iCloud, but something is going to change in the future," WABetaInfo recently wrote on its page.
This is currently under development and Android device users who have installed the latest WhatsApp update can still back up their messages and media on Google Drive without any limit because their backups will not count against their Google Drive storage quota as yet. "Three months ago, we spotted a new feature under development that allows managing your WhatsApp chats when backing up on Google Drive: the user could be able to exclude certain message types from the backup, in order to save space on Google Drive," WABetaInfo added.
According to the code strings spotted, in particular, they are planning to introduce changes for backups (“Google Drive backup changing”), notifications about when Google Drive is almost full, when the limit is reached and information about when the changes take effect (“%1$s limit starts on %2$s.”). It might take some time to become a reality, but it should not come as a surprise as the tech giant stopped offering unlimited storage for Google Photos last year.