How to export Whatsapp messages

This was rather easy with my rooted Android phone. However, when flashing it with Android 6 due to some memory leaks, root access does not work anymore. Neither by adb, nor by Kingoroot and Kingroot.

To export Whatsapp messages, however, I urgently need the whatsapp.cryptkey. And this key is only accessible in a rooted phone.

So I went down by another strategy by using WhatsApp-Key-DB-Extractor-master script on the Mac. To make this work, the JAVA JDK needs to be updated to at least version 7. The JDK needs to be manually downloaded and installed from the Oracle site

oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8-downloads-2133151.html

In a next step, the Android Debug Bridge needs to be updated from the terminal as the version in the zip file listed the phone as being inactive

brew cask install android-platform-tools

Then we can run

WhatsAppKeyDBExtract.sh

which puts 5 new files

axolotl.db
chatsettings.db
msgstore.db
wa.db
whatsapp.cryptkey

into the

/WhatsApp-Key-DB-Extractor-master/extracted/

folder. Move this folder back to the SD card where the “Backup Text for Whats” App can find the key to export all encrypted Whatsapp messages.