Decrypt WhatsApp encrypted media files
I thought I’d take this opportunity to describe my recent experience submitting a bug report for WhatsApp on iOS.<p>When you export a chat, you get a zip file containing the messages as plain text, plus any media files referenced in the chat. The .txt file unfortunately only contains the text-only messages, not the text captions for media items. I reported this as a bug and was told this was functioning as intended.<p>So this is a warning to anyone who thinks they are backing up their WhatsApp chats via the export feature that their backups are incomplete.<p>As a workaround, you can get hold of the ChatStorage.sqlite file from an iTunes backup of your phone. All text is in there but you obviously have to query the database and format it into a readable sequence of messages.<p>This really, really sucks as a workflow and I hope if any WhatsApp engineers ever read this  they start working on a real export feature.