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Little by little, WhatsApp is updating its features with news that users have been waiting for a long time: a dark theme, calls on hold, native integration of the share menu, video conferences of up to eight people but there is something that is perhaps most expected by everybody: WhatsApp compatibility with iPads.

The aesthetic part has been ready for many months, but it is not just that. The arrival of WhatsApp on tablets is not going to be like computers (an application that simply reflects what is seen on the phone through a Wi-Fi network), if not will also bring with it native multi-device support. And that will have many effects on the way we manage WhatsApp.

Lets review the current situation. While the rest of the messaging services already store their data in the cloud by default (special mention to the quality of Telegram here), WhatsApp keep saving your messages by default in the local storage of your iPhone. It is the only limit you have to be able to save those messages.

Additionally, WhatsApp does a backup of all those messages (at least the text ones) in iCloud as long as there is enough storage for it. With what I have seen in my experience as a trainer, the most common case of the general user is that they do not notice that system and do not spend time managing that storage. The consequence is having to spend a lot of time cleaning once the iPhone starts giving warnings that its storage is full.

How is the cloud management of our WhatsApp messages going to be once Facebook decides to make that transition?

As I said before, there is no management from computers. The applications for macOS and Windows are limited to consulting everything that is stored in the WhatsApp client for iPhone, nothing more. That will change once the multi-device support arrives from the clients hand for iPadOS.

The very word of mult multi-device support already implies the change that we are going to have to make: move from storing all our WhatsApp messages, images and videos history from iPhone local storage to the cloud in order to synchronize everything comfortably as the other services already do. The million euro question is: what is that cloud going to be like?

Facebook has to make a choice based on how it wants to evolve WhatsApp. First of all we could see something like Telegram Apparently unlimited cloud storage. That would solve all our WhatsApp data storage problems, because being based on the cloud there would be no problems to access them. Perhaps, if we do not do periodic cleaning and we do not have the option to deactivate it, the download of those files in the devices would continue to fill our storage, so we would continue to be advised not to accumulate message history.

The drawback of choosing this course is that WhatsApp is a real machine for generating data. The service is used by more than 1.6 billion people worldwide (more than four times Telegram users), which translates into billions of messages, images and videos that suddenly have to be stored on servers. Is there an alternative to this?

We could see the arrival of a subscription model to extra storage, as already happens in iCloud or Google Drive

We can think of a business model, as for example they do in Dropbox, iCloud or Google Drive. Offer a certain amount of free cloud storage to store our message history, with the possibility of expanding that space for a monthly or annual payment (I still remember paying the annual euro to be able to use WhatsApp in its beginnings).

Facebook I would get, almost out of the blue, a huge source of income and a huge base of paying customers from those 1,600 people who consider WhatsApp absolutely essential in their lives. They could even offer unlimited storage for text messages, while images, videos, and audios would take up space in the cloud with that business model.

This may be an interesting future for WhatsApp, which would either educate everyone to keep at bay the storage that all their conversations occupy or would encourage them to pay not to do so for at least a good time. For all this, the arrival of WhatsApp for the iPad is going to be much more important than we think.

When will it arrive? Well we dont know for sure, but it should be sooner rather than later. And when it does, one way or another, we must continue to monitor all the space that our WhatsApp conversations occupy, either locally or in the cloud that appears before us. My advice: lets get ready for this change.

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your arrival will also bring changes in the management of our chats - Explica