WhatsApp Viewer

Small tool to display chats from the Android msgstore.db database.

Status

🛑⚠ WhatsApp Viewer does not work with the latest WhatsApp database format. ⚠🛑

I only maintain this project every once in a while.

WhatsApp gets a lot of updates with a bunch of new features.
I do have interests beside this project and unfortunately not enough time to keep up with the updates.

This project is not dead though (even if it looks like it), and I still take a plaintext database backup once in a while (about every year) and try to update this software accordingly.

How to use

1. You need root access to your phone. If you don't know what it is: Wikipedia
2. Download your WhatsApp database and key files:

• /data/data/com.whatsapp/files/key
• /data/data/com.whatsapp/databases/msgstore.db
• /data/data/com.whatsapp/databases/wa.db

1. Open WhatsApp Viewer
2. File -> Open -> Select file
3. Select msgstore.db in the folder "extracted"
4. Leave account name empty, is was used for older versions of WhatsApp (crypt5)
5. Optional: If you want, you can import contact names from the wa.db file

Command line support

"WhatsApp Viewer.exe" -decrypt14 msgstore-2016-10-22.1.db.crypt14 whatsapp.cryptkey14 decrypted.db

You cannot see bigger images because only thumbnails are stored in the database.

Build

Visual Studio

Open WhatsApp Viewer.sln.

Command-line

See build-release.cmd.

Vagrant

You can also use vagrant to build (for example if you are on a Linux machine):

vagrant up
vagrant powershell -c 'cmd.exe /c "cd C:\vagrant && build-release.cmd"'

Android Emulator

I use the Android Emulator to test WhatsApp (and the creation of backups) on my developer machine.

I'm on Manjaro and use this (see here):

sudo mkdir /opt/android-sdk/platforms
sudo mkdir /opt/android-sdk/platform-tools
yay -S android-sdk-cmdline-tools-latest android-emulator
yes | sudo sdkmanager "system-images;android-30;google_apis;x86"
avdmanager create avd --name "WhatsApp-Viewer" --package "system-images;android-30;google_apis;x86" --device "Nexus 6P"
emulator -avd "WhatsApp-Viewer"

adb install ./WhatsApp.apk

adb pull -a /sdcard/WhatsApp/Databases/msgstore.db.crypt14
adb root
adb pull -a /data/data/com.whatsapp
adb unroot

I've also did this to enable the hardware keyboard.

Export schema

sqlite3 msgstore.db ".schema --nosys" > ./data/msgstore.db.schema.sql

Build test database

rm -f ./data/test-database.db && sqlite3 ./data/test-database.db -cmd ".read data/msgstore.db.schema.sql" ".read data/test-database.sql"

Credits

• @askeron and @zmeyc for bulk export https://github.com/andreas-mausch/whatsapp-viewer/pull/103
• @torsade for crypt14 support https://github.com/andreas-mausch/whatsapp-viewer/pull/115
• TripCode for crypt12 support https://github.com/EliteAndroidApps/WhatsApp-Crypt12-Decrypter
• Whatsapp Xtract
• pwncrypt5.py https://github.com/aramosf/pwncrypt5/blob/master/pwncrypt5.py
• SQLite
• MD5 http://bobobobo.wordpress.com/2010/10/17/md5-c-implementation/
• UTF8 http://utfcpp.sourceforge.net/
• AES https://polarssl.org/aes-source-code
• Base64 http://www.adp-gmbh.ch/cpp/common/base64.html
• Zlib http://www.zlib.net/
• RapidJSON http://rapidjson.org/
• mbedtls https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbedtls