reading whatsapp messages

Empty picture Empty · Mar 19, 2013 · Viewed 27.5k times · Source

I want to create an android app which reads inbox as well as whatsapp messages. I want to make a backup kind of thing. Though there is option for doing so in whatsapp. But I want to read the messages and then back them up from my app. I got to know that whatsapp stores messages in encrypted format in the file system. So can anyone please tell me how to read that encrypted file.

Answer

Raghav Sood picture Raghav Sood · Mar 19, 2013

WhatsApp makes a chat backup everyday at 4 AM on your SD Card. This is a single database encrypted with an AES key. Since it is on the external storage, your app can read it if you have access to the external storage.

You can easily decrypt this database (there is a paper available on this online).

However, this will only give you updated chats once every 24 hours.

If you want more realtime updates, your device has to be rooted, and you will need a completely new parser, as on the internal storage the chats are stored in more than one database.