WhatsApp could lose unlimited Google Drive backup
WhatsApp on iOS and Android use different backup systems. On iOS, WhatsApp relies on Apple’s iCloud service, while on Android it uses Google Drive. The advantage Android has over iOS is that for WhatsApp chats, it appears to be unlimited storage which is great if WhatsApp is your primary messenger.
That could change soon, according to code strings discovered by WABetaInfo in which it references error messages WhatsApp could display to users informing them that their Google Drive storage is full or almost full. This would suggest that in the future, WhatsApp users on Android could lose access to that unlimited storage on Google Drive.
That being said, it might not necessarily be all bad news. Right now, Google Drive offers users 15GB for free, so it is possible that maybe Google could introduce a different backup plan for WhatsApp users that will not count towards that 15GB limit. This means that your chat backup storage will not eat into the 15GB allocation.
We cannot confirm if that will be the case, but hopefully it will go in that direction. Some WhatsApp chat backups can be quite big because some users choose to backup not just photos, but videos as well, which can contribute to larger backup sizes. In any case, we’ll have to wait and see how this one plays out, but it’s something that Android users with large WhatsApp backups might need to pay attention to.
Source: WABetaInfo