Here is a fact most people do not know: when your iPhone is backed up over the cable, the backup carries your WhatsApp history. The chats, the group threads, the photos people shared, the reactions under them. All of it rides along in the same backup as your text messages, sitting on your own disk.
Text2Store now reads it. Back up your iPhone the way you already do, and a WhatsApp tab appears beside Apple Messages. No pairing, no QR codes, no cloud account, no separate export dance on the phone. The chats come out of the backup you were already making.
What you get
The same treatment your texts get. Group conversations with the group's name and members. Photos and videos, right in the thread. Reactions, grouped the way WhatsApp shows them, and you can click one to see who reacted. Search across every conversation. And every export the app has: PDF, CSV, plain text, printing, RSMF for eDiscovery review, and the tamper-evident verified export, WhatsApp data included, covered by certified backups like every other file.
Names deserve a sentence, because WhatsApp groups are harder than they look. Modern WhatsApp identifies group members by an opaque internal ID, not a phone number. Text2Store resolves people the way WhatsApp itself does: your address book first, then the name a person chose for themselves, shown with WhatsApp's own "~" prefix so you can tell the difference, then their phone number. When none of that exists in the backup, the sender is shown as unknown. We do not guess, because a made-up name in an export is worse than no name.
Why WhatsApp gets its own tab
You will notice WhatsApp chats do not blend into one list with your texts. That is deliberate, and the reason is honesty rather than tidiness: the two sources cannot promise the same things, and a blended list would blur exactly the differences that matter.
The big one is deletion. When someone deletes a WhatsApp message for everyone, WhatsApp removes it from the phone itself. It is not hidden, it is gone, so no backup made afterwards can contain it. Apple Messages behaves differently: deleted texts often survive inside a backup for a while, and Text2Store keeps and flags them. Same app, two truths, and the interface should not paper over that.
Edits are similar. WhatsApp keeps only the current text of an edited message. The earlier wording does not exist anywhere in the backup, and an edit made by the other person may not even be marked. So Text2Store marks what it can prove and claims nothing more.
Every export of a WhatsApp conversation says this out loud: a short scope note in the file explains that messages deleted for everyone are not included and that edit history is not recorded. If a conversation export is ever handed to someone who needs to rely on it, we would rather it state its own limits than let a reader assume completeness the data cannot promise.
What this means in practice
The practical consequence of all this is simple: the archive you build is only as complete as your backup habit. A message deleted for everyone yesterday is not recoverable today, by us or by anyone reading the same backup honestly. But a message that was on the phone the day you backed up is in that archive for good, whatever happens to it on the phone afterwards. Back up regularly and each archive preserves what the phone still had that day.
Two housekeeping notes. Archives made before WhatsApp support did not copy WhatsApp's data, and there is no way to conjure it into them afterwards, so your WhatsApp history starts with the first backup you make on a version that supports it. Update, plug in, back up. And this reads WhatsApp from iPhone backups; there is no Android version.
One more distinction worth drawing, because the names collide: this has nothing to do with WhatsApp's own chat backup to iCloud. That is a separate mechanism, and Text2Store neither uses nor touches it. Everything here happens on your computer, from the device backup it makes over the cable.
The WhatsApp guide has the full details. Or just download the app, back up your phone, and open the tab. The chats were already there.