A friend just called me, panicking all over, because his phone battery is bloating. Bad sign, for sure. Now he wants to backup/transfer his whatsapp stuff and... good lord is it hard. xD You can't "just" copy the WhatsApp folder - oh hell no. Because his new phone has G-Services, you have to trick it into loading a local-file backup and whatnot. It is an absurd hassle.

All I am left is asking myself: Why are they so insistent on using Google Drive as soon as you have G-Services? Their local data solution is not even documented on their own help center, whilst it is perfectly an option - his old Huawei phone has none, so Whatsapp immediately shows him the option to backup locally. But his new Oppo phone insists on using Google Drive.

After a lot of back and forth, he went to bed frustrated. Several supposedly working methods we found online... did in fact not work.

He found a rather poorly filmed video where someone might have a solution but the dude's even blinder than I, so this is proving to be a difficulty and a half.

What the heck is Meta doing? xD