dr.fone did the thing WhatsApp should…
dr.fone did the thing WhatsApp should have supported, already. I did spend some time setting up everything, so some computer proficiency is required, but the data transfer itself went smoothly. Two things I didn't like: 1. The trial doesn't do anything useful. It creates the backup, but can't do anything with it. I didn't discover this until I tried to restore the backup to my new device. Nothing on the site informed me of this. 2. The advertised price is not what you have to pay. Taxes are not included. That's dirty marketing. I also find the packaging a bit unfair. My use case was to transfer data from my old S8 to my new iPhone. People usually don't do that every year or more frequently. So having to pay $25 (w/taxes) for one year subscription when I use this exactly once is not very valuable, so I paid $30 for the lifetime in case I need to do this again in two years or so. Most valuable would be if WhatsApp got their act together and started to support transfers between different makes for the same phone number (they support it if you change your number, go figure). Second best would be if dr.fone came with a shorter subscription, say a month for $5, for us one time users.