Who is behind ChatExport

Why I wrote this

My name is Krzysztof Kowalski, and the first version of ChatExport was written for me.

After my divorce I was preparing for a child support and custody case. Almost everything that had been agreed in those months existed only as messages: dates, arrangements, who said they would do what and when. It had to go in front of a court, so I started taking screenshots. I took 150 of them and ended up with a folder of images carrying no dates, in no particular order, half of them cut off mid sentence. Any one of them falls apart under a single question: what was above it, and what came after?

So I looked at what else there was. The programs that read an iPhone do thirty things at once and this one thing worst of all: what comes out looks like a database dump, not like a document you would want to hand to a lawyer. I have written software for years, so in the end I sat down and built it myself.

The first PDF ChatExport ever produced was filed in my own case. It helped, and my lawyer was impressed by it. I am not promising the same for you, because what a court accepts is the court’s decision. But the difference between a folder of screenshots and one ordered document is visible from the first page.

Then it occurred to me how many people are in exactly the same position: awake at two in the morning, phone in hand, scrolling a conversation from two years ago looking for one sentence. That is why the app was finished properly and given to everyone, instead of staying on my own disk.

It is also why ChatExport runs entirely on your computer. Your messages never reach a server of mine and never go to the cloud. I have no access to them and I do not want any. When I was exporting my own conversation it would not have crossed my mind to send it to a stranger, and I am not going to ask that of you.

If you have a question or something does not work, write to me directly. There is a real person and a registered business behind ChatExport, not an anonymous website.