WhatsApp Wrapped: your chat's year in review
Every December the year-in-review recaps arrive: the music you played, the shows you watched, the miles you ran. WhatsApp doesn't have an official one, which is odd, given it's probably where you spend the most time.
Why WhatsApp has no official Wrapped
The reason is technical, and it comes down to how the app is built.
WhatsApp messages are end-to-end encrypted: WhatsApp can't read your conversations, not even to count them. A streaming service knows exactly what you played because everything passes through its servers. WhatsApp, by design, doesn't have that information.
So the only place your year of messages exists is your own phone. And that's why a yearly recap can only be built from the export, on your device.
What you can see about your year
Volume
How many messages you sent, how many words, how many voice notes. The numbers tend to surprise people: a daily conversation racks up tens of thousands of messages in a year.
The busiest day
It almost always lines up with something: a birthday, a move, a trip, some news. It's the stat people share most, because it tells a story.
The longest silence
The longest stretch where nobody wrote. In one-on-one chats it usually marks a fight, a trip, or just a busy season.
Your rhythm through the year
The monthly activity map shows whether the relationship intensified, cooled off, or held steady. It's the most revealing part and the hardest to see by reading.
The words of the year
The ones you repeated most, which tend to be surprisingly specific to that relationship and that year.
How to build it
- Export the chat as a .txt from WhatsApp.
- Upload it here.
- Use the range filter to narrow it to the year you want.
- Download the summary card.
The filter is what turns general statistics into a yearly recap: you can compare one year against another in the same chat and see what changed.
Which year is worth looking at
The calendar year is the convention, but it's rarely the cut that tells a conversation's story best. A chat that started in March has its first year running March to March, and slicing it at December leaves you counting two halves of nothing.
The range filter isn't tied to the calendar: you can set it from the first message to twelve months later, or to any window that actually means something. The one-year, six-month and one-month presets are there for speed, and the two date pickers for an exact cut.
And in a chat spanning several years, the exercise that shows the most isn't looking at one year but at two: the same numbers, the same chat, two different ranges. That's where a change becomes visible.
What won't be in your recap
The recap is built from what's in the file, and the file has known gaps. Deleted messages aren't there. Neither is anything lost when you switched phones: if you changed devices in March and restored a partial backup, your year actually begins there rather than in January.
Reactions aren't exported, so a message with fifteen thumbs-up weighs exactly the same as any other. Quoted replies lose the link — the text survives, not what it was answering — and an edited message shows up only as its final version.
None of this gets filled in by estimate. A recap with fewer rows beats one with an invented number, which is why any figure that can't be computed directly simply isn't shown.
It's worth checking the date range before reading anything into the numbers: if it starts in March and you expected January, that's your explanation.
Why the numbers will look high
Almost everyone underestimates how much they write. A daily back-and-forth, counting the "sure"s, the "haha"s and the twenty-second voice notes, reaches figures that don't feel like they match chatting for a bit each day.
A message is a message regardless of length, and that's the catch: someone who writes in bursts of four separate lines racks up four times as many as someone who sends one paragraph. That's why words and characters sit next to the message total — the same thing counted in another unit, and usually the one that settles the reading.
Sharing it without exposing anyone
An important difference from app wrapped recaps: this data comes from a private conversation between people, not from your individual consumption.
Before sharing a card, keep in mind the other person didn't choose to publish anything. Anonymous mode replaces the names, which solves most of the problem if you want to show the numbers without showing who's in them.
Do it for several chats
The year in review gets more interesting through comparison: your chat with your closest friend, the family group, and the work group tell three completely different stories about the same year.
Each one processes separately, and none of them is uploaded anywhere.
Why you don't have to wait for December
Year-in-review recaps land in December out of habit, not necessity. You can look at the last twelve months at any point, or narrow to a specific stretch: the months of a trip, the year you lived in the same city, the summer you met.