WhatsApp for Android has no limit on Google Drive storage for your backups. The reason for this was an agreement that took place a few years ago between WhatsApp and Google. Until now this benefit was a big advantage compared to iOS users, as Apple does not offer an unlimited iCloud plan for the instant messaging app, but that looks like that will change in the future.
WhatsApp will no longer have unlimited backup on Google Drive
According to the website wabetainfo, three months ago, its team discovered a new WhatsApp chat management feature by backing up the app to Google Drive. The functionality allowed the user to exclude certain types of messages from the backup to save space on Google Drive. At that moment, however, wabetainfo noticed something different:
“WhatsApp backups no longer count towards our Google Drive storage quota… Google plans to stop offering the unlimited plan to store our WhatsApp backups.”
In the image below, provided by wabetainfo, we can see strings that explain what will be changed in future updates. According to wabetainfo, WhatsApp plans to implement changes to backups (“Google Drive backup changing”), adding the notification feature to notify you when Google Drive is almost full, message about when the limit is reached and information about when the changes will take effect (“%1$s limit starts at %2$s.”). That’s hardly shocking considering Google Photos lost unlimited storage last year.
There will still be free space to store WhatsApp backups
Looking further into the strings, we see that Google will still offer a certain quota to store WhatsApp backups for free. However, there is no way to know information about what the new storage plan will look like.