I'm very hopeful this reverse engineering effort will enable the creation of a tool to export my conversations (WhatsApp can do email export, which let's be real, doesn't cut it for most cases).<p>A point to those that support migrating to alternatives such as Signal. Signal is good, but far from great for a single reason: you need a phone number. This is very bad in necsec and reliability terms, my case:<p>Reliability: like more and more people, I travel all the time between countries and live out of Airbnbs. Hence my pre-paid phone numbers changes very regularly. If I lose my phone, I lose the phone number, I also lose my Whatsapp/Signal key associated with my phone number.<p>Netsec: A phone number is associated with your physical identity, you might not care, but more and more people do care about this stuff. Yes there are ways around that, but nothing straightforward and actually practical.<p>I'm patiently, but eagerly, looking forward to status.im .