Google to start charging WhatsApp users for backing up messages – 7NEWS

Google has announced WhatsApp chat backups on Android devices will no longer be free starting in December, and will contribute to your Google account storage quota.Android users have previously enjoyed free WhatsApp chat backups, unlike users on Apple’s iOS.For those who don’t subscribe to Google’s subscription service ‘Google One’, the implications are clear. The standard 15GB of free data, which includes storage for Gmail, Google Photos and various other Google applications, will now also need to accommodate WhatsApp chat backups.Watch the latest News on Channel 7 or stream for free on 7plus >>Depending on the duration of your WhatsApp usage and the amount of media shared within the platform, these backups could become quite substantial, and large.What options do you have?Users with large chat histories and lots of shared media files have four primary options.First, they can totally opt out of cloud backups, a process accessible through the WhatsApp settings menu by navigating to the chat backup option and changing the ‘Backup to Google Drive’ setting to Never.However, this choice comes with a significant trade-off – the risk of losing all the chat data if the current phone is lost or damaged.The second option involves reducing the size of the
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