WhatsApp Wrapped: Your Year in Messages

Your WhatsApp export is a plain text file with every message, its timestamp and its sender. Read as a whole, it's a year (or five) of your life with someone, and the numbers are surprisingly personal:

• Total messages and words — the headline number. Long chats regularly reach five or six figures.
• Your top emojis — the 😂 count alone is usually worth the export.
• Your peak hour — whether you're morning-check-in people or 1am philosophers.
• Your longest streak — the longest run of consecutive days you messaged each other.
• Your busiest month — and the month-by-month shape of the whole year.
• Your balance score — how evenly the two of you carried the conversation.

It's the kind of summary WhatsApp itself never shows you, built from the export feature that's been in the app all along.

What makes it feel like a year-in-review rather than a spreadsheet is the shape of the whole thing: the months that spike when something big happened, the quiet stretches when life got busy, the streak that quietly survived all of it. You'll likely find yourself scrolling the timeline and remembering why certain months look the way they do.

The whole thing takes a few minutes, and most of that is the export itself:

1. Export the chat from WhatsApp as a .txt file, choosing “without media”. The export guide has step-by-step instructions for iPhone and Android.
2. Drop the file into BetweenChats. It's read in your browser — nothing is uploaded — and your report appears in about a minute.
3. Scroll your year: the totals, the timeline, the emojis, the streaks. Then make your card.

There's no account and nothing to install. If you want to see the result before exporting your own chat, the demo runs the full experience on a synthetic sample conversation.

A Wrapped-style recap needs something you can post. BetweenChats generates a story-sized card — exactly 1080 × 1920, ready for Instagram Stories, WhatsApp Status or anywhere else — with your headline stats: messages, time span, balance, top emoji and peak activity.

Because a chat involves two people, the card comes with privacy controls. You choose how names appear — real names, initials (the default), or fully anonymous — and whether the date range is shown. The card is drawn on your device and downloaded or shared straight from your browser; the image is never uploaded to a server to be generated.

There's also a “Challenge someone 👀” option, which copies a message and link you can send to the other person in the chat — because the only thing more fun than your own year in messages is comparing it with theirs. The link points at the BetweenChats homepage; it carries no trace of your report, so what they see is the invitation, not your data.

A year-in-review only works if you can relax into it, so the architecture is simple: your chat file is read locally in your browser, the report lives in your browser's session storage, and the share card is rendered on your device. Nothing about the conversation — messages, names, stats — is sent to BetweenChats servers. When you close the tab or press delete, it's gone.

And one note on interpretation, because it matters: the stats measure conversational patterns, not relationship health or compatibility. A great year of chatting is a great year of chatting — enjoy it for what it is.