If the same feature were built on Android or iPhone, the data would be encrypted, and the researchers would have had a hard time accessing the SQLite file itself.
Microsoft's takeaway from this negative news would be that it needs to lock down Windows 12 by adopting designs from Android and iPhone, effectively closing it off.
I recently got an iPhone and had to migrate to it from my Android phone which turned out to be really unpleasant because I could not carry over WhatsApp data.
Turns out that the SQLite database is encrypted and I can’t easily carry it over, nor even get the encryption key in a non-rooted device.
Furthermore, there is also the issue that Android only backs up to Google Drive whereas the iPhone only backs up to iCloud so I could not restore from backup either.
A task that should have taken minutes took me hours and I had to buy some questionable software.
https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/iphone-andr...
https://faq.whatsapp.com/686469079565350/?helpref=hc_fnav
I didn't end up going through with it through since there was no way to take a Signal backup created in Android and restore it to IOS.
As I pointed out in the post, this was pretty much the dealbreaker for me. I had initially set up the iPhone without all of my accounts, just for development, but had gradually carried over my accounts and the apps I need to use. And then I find out that I’d basically need to wipe all of the progress and start over, just because the data move can’t be initiated with an already set up phone (which probably made developing the app easier, but at the same time limits its usefulness).
It's been a while, but I think I used this github repo [0], that was the first search result, and it also mentions the 64 character long key.
If you still have the key and encrypted database, you "only" need to:
1. Have python
2. Install the project like described in the README
3. Execute
wacreatekey --hex <your_64_characters>
wadecrypt encrypted_backup.key msgstore.db.crypt15 msgstore.db