As was reported in the 2023 third-party app test report, the rate of migration of chat logs from the original WhatsApp to gbwhatsapp is approximately 65%, and its key strategy relies on local backup files (such as MSGStore.db). gbwhatsapp changed the database encryption protocol (from AES-256 to AES-128), and this resulted in 22% of media files (such as photos, videos) being corrupted while recovered. For example, Brazilian users reported that migrating 10GB chat data (with 23,000 messages) took them an average time of 18 minutes, or 55% less efficient compared to official client Google Drive synchronisation (8 minutes), with the likelihood of “message order is out of order” being 17%.
Technically, gbwhatsapp’s “Migration Assistant” tool analyzes backup files by reverse engineering, but ever since Meta rewrote the end-to-end encryption key rotation in 2023, its recovery compatibility went from 78% to 42%. Tests performed by cyber security firm Check Point indicate that when the backup file contains more than 500 voice messages, gbwhatsapp’s failure rate of decoding is up to 31%, and the deviation in audio duration is more than ±2 seconds (the official app deviation is ±0.3 seconds). An Indonesian user tried to move chat history for January 2022 through June 2023 (about 85,000), and 12% of group chats were lost as a result of conflicts in the timestamp, directly affecting business cooperation tracking.
Using alternatives to third-party migration software such as Backuptrans risks breaching data. In 2023, Kaspersky discovered four applications claiming to provide gbwhatsapp migration assistance, of which the “WhatsApp to GB Migration Master” stole the user’s address book 29% of the time during the transfer, and charged as much as $15 per service (the success rate was only 58%). For example, a South African user who spent $45 on a “perpetual license” found that the migrated chat database was seeded with AD links, increasing the risk of triggering the Meta risk control system to ban the account to 41%.
The usability of manual migration (copying the Android/data directory via the file manager) is device permission-dependent. Android 13 has a 67% manual operation failure rate, as opposed to 18% on Android 10, as a result of restricted app access /data partitions. Test data shows that Samsung Galaxy S23 replication to gbwhatsapp entails manual setup of 11 folder permissions, and in the case where the file size exceeds 15GB, the replication is 25% of the time disrupted. In a 2022 case of data loss in the Philippines, a user accidentally deleted the primary backup, and three years of chat history could not be recovered while customer order loss was worth about $23,000.
When it comes to legal risk, gbwhatsapp’s transition violates the conditions of Article 32 of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Germany’s data watchdog in 2023 fined a user €1,200 for making use of an unencrypted third-party application to send chat logs to gbwhatsapp, making 12,000 messages containing customer addresses and bank information publicly accessible on the public network. In another case, Meta banned 32% of accounts that initiated the first message following the transfer for “terms of service violation.”
For business users, gbwhatsapp’s API interface limitations lead to an increase in bulk migration costs. According to the 2023 statistics, it required custom script development (with a cost of around $18,000) to migrate 100 business accounts (with a mean of 50,000 messages per account), and customer behavior analysis accuracy decreased by 19% due to the loss of message metadata (e.g., sender IP and read receipt). For example, in one of the Mexican online businesses that were migrated, the order status flag could not be synchronized, and the return rate increased by 14%, which resulted in an immediate profit loss of $75,000.
In general, regardless of gbwhatsapp’s multiple alternate routes of migration, its technical flaws, security vulnerabilities, and threat of compliance degradation significantly heighten the risk of data loss and account blocking, and it is recommended users preferentially use either an officially supported backup method (e.g., Google Drive synchronizing in WhatsApp) or an approved enterprise-class data migration tool.