And it’s not for a good reason

WhatsApp may be more popular than Telegram, but it’s not as feature rich as its competition. Slowly but steadily, however, the Facebook-owned messaging service added new features to the platform, with encrypted chat backups, cross-device support, voicemail transcripts and more in development. WABetaInfo has now discovered another new feature in development in WhatsApp for Android: a way to control the size of backups.

The size of full chat backups for heavy WhatsApp users can easily reach a few gigabytes. The most obvious way to reduce this is to not back up media files with chat history, which might not be acceptable to everyone.

The next “Manage Backup Size” option will provide users with granular controls over their WhatsApp chat backups and allow them to archive only important file types like photos, documents, videos, and audio. WhatsApp will also provide a real-time estimate of the size of your chat database based on your backup selection.

There might be another reason WhatsApp is working on this feature, however. WhatsApp backups on Google Drive are not currently counted towards your account’s storage quota. However, WABetaInfo speculates that this may change in the future, with Google only offering a limited plan with up to 2GB of free space per user for WhatsApp chat backups. This means that larger backups may partially count towards your Google Account’s storage quota.

Google has gotten a bit stingy about offering free storage recently. It killed Google Photos’ free backup plan earlier this year despite its popularity and usefulness. With WhatsApp being used by over 2 billion active users around the world, it won’t be surprising that Google is also doing something similar for WhatsApp chat backups.

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