The Telegram messenger development team yesterday released a new version of the app for Android and iOS that offers an option to import chats from WhatsApp, Line and KakaoTalk messengers.
As mentioned, more than 100 million young people users joined Telegram in January 2021 according to a company announcement. Telegram didn't reveal where they came from, but it's very likely that WhatsApp/Facebook's privacy changes played a big part in it.
The new import option supports individual and group discussions and includes documents and video. Images are not explicitly mentioned, which is strange as WhatsApp chats should include them.
New mode it seems to work fine, but it takes a long time to load the content. Exporting the content to Google Drive was much faster.
The process is simple:
Open a chat on WhatsApp, it does not matter if it is a group or individual chat.
Select Menu - More - Export chat.
Choose whether you want media to be included or not.
Then the Share menu will open. Select Telegram from the list of available options.
Select a group in Telegram to save the chat and supported attachments.
It will take some time for the information to be entered.
Telegram notes that users can save space on device after the import is complete freeing up space on it. This is done in Settings – Data and Storage – Storage Usage.
From there you can delete your data as it is already stored on the service servers.