Soon your backups of WhatsApp do count against your Google Drive account’s storage limit. If your Drive is full, you’ll have to pay.
Thanks to an agreement between Google and WhatsApp, you can make free backups of your messages on Google Drive. Those backups quickly take up several gigabytes of storage space, but they don’t count against your Drive account limit. That will soon change, Webetainfo discovered. That Web site discovered evidence in WhatsApp’s code for new functionality, such as alerts when there’s very little space left for a backup.
Promotion of Google One
When the free backups will be a thing of the past is still unclear. The strategy is not very surprising. For example, Google promised at the launch of Google Photos that your images would not count against the limit, but went back on that last year as well. The Internet giant has been a lot stingier with its cloud storage space since the introduction of Google One. That’s a subscription that starts at $19.99 a year that includes Drive storage, among other things. By cutting back on existing free functionality, Google hopes to make its subscription formula more attractive.
A free Drive account is good for 15 GB. Both Gmail and Google Photos and soon WhatsApp count against that limit. Webateinfo seems to infer from the code it analyzed that Google still wants to set aside a certain quota for WhatsApp backups but it is unclear how much space is involved and how it compares to the 15 GB.
Potentially annoying
The limitation is annoying for users who want to switch smartphones without losing their WhatsApp messages. Currently, WhatsApp for Android only offers a backup option via Google Drive. The new restrictions would be accompanied by additional features that would make it easier to determine which type of messages you want to backup and which you don’t. Hopefully, WhatsApp will soon come out with support for more storage services so that no one is forced to pay Google.
The rumors for the changes come at a time when WhatsApp is looking to make a big push to appeal to new users. In Europe, the messaging service is the standard, but it is different in the US. There, Apple and iMessage have a much larger market share and Facebook Messenger also enjoys more popularity. Among other things, WhatsApp is said to be working on an application for the iPad to win over new people.