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Last updated 15 October 2026

Each release, newest first, and what it changed. The download page always serves the newest version, which today is 1.2.1. ChatExport never contacts a server, so it does not update itself: updating means downloading the new installer and running it over the old one. Your exports are ordinary files on your disk and are not touched.

1.2.1 (15 October 2026)

  • The attachment index cites the right page. Each photo or file is listed with the page it is printed on. Until now the index gave the page its section started on, and every number was also short by the length of the table of contents.
  • No gaps after hyphens and colons. Exhibit numbers, “SHA-256” and the export time in the optional footer line printed with a wide space after each hyphen or colon (“EX- 001”). They now print as written.
  • A document with calls names both of its sources. The integrity page now gives the SHA-256 of the phone’s call log as well as of the message database whenever the calls came from it.
  • The HTML export keeps the original photos. The photos beside the page are the backup’s own files under the phone’s own names, so their SHA-256 matches the attachment index of the PDF. A HEIC photo is still converted to be shown, with its original copied beside it and linked under the picture.
  • Smaller fixes. Book View sets messages ragged-right instead of stretching short lines, and prints every checksum in its attachment index in full. RSMF says whether a removed message was unsent by its sender or recovered after deletion. In languages that write them so, month and weekday names are lower case in the middle of a line. Day separators are larger in all three themes.
  • The download is about 145 MB, the same as 1.2.0.

1.2.0 (15 October 2026)

  • A conversation can carry its calls. One switch on the export screen puts the calls with that person between the messages, at the moment they happened: incoming, outgoing and missed, with their duration. It works for one-to-one iPhone conversations, not groups and not imported WhatsApp chats, and only from an encrypted backup, the only kind Apple writes the call log into. A call is not a message, so it takes no number and is not counted, and the document states these limits itself.
  • Names are checked before the export, not after it. The export screen lists everyone the document will name and lets you correct each name. Only the label changes, never the number, and the document lists every correction beside the number it applies to.
  • The whole export can be checked as one thing. One switch writes a zip with the document, its .sha256 file and the photos, a report giving the hash of each file, and one checksum over the whole set, with the recipe to recompute it. In the attachment index every attachment gets its own exhibit number (EX-014) and the SHA-256 of the original file in the backup.
  • A third PDF theme, Book View. It sets the conversation as a printed book: 6 × 9 inch pages, a chapter for each month, each message a paragraph. Chat View and Court View are unchanged.
  • Smaller things for filing. A file name pattern ({title}, {date}, {from}, {to}, {format}) so a series of exports names and sorts itself. An optional third footer line with the device, the moment of export and the date of the backup, so one loose sheet still says where it came from. The attachment index says what kind of file each one is, and a video gets a still frame instead of an icon. A new day is easier to find on paper.
  • Fixes. The preview no longer covers a message whose text survived deletion with “Message deleted”: it shows the text and a separate deleted marker, and it now marks edited messages too. The conversation list says how many conversations have no messages in this backup. A very large PDF no longer leaves the window unresponsive while it is saved.
  • The download is about 145 MB, down from 188.

1.0.0 (14 September 2026)

  • The app makes the backup itself. You no longer open Apple Devices and click Back Up Now. Plug the iPhone in, unlock it, press Back up now, and answer the Trust and passcode prompts on the phone. A repeat run copies only what changed, and says which of the two it did. Apple Devices or iTunes still has to be installed, because that is where Apple’s USB driver comes from, but you do not have to open it.
  • The interface speaks the same fourteen languages as the document. German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, both Portuguese variants, Czech, Romanian, Swedish, Ukrainian and Russian join English and Polish. The two choices stay separate, so you can work in your own language and hand a court a document in another. None of the fourteen was machine-translated.
  • Every page of the document says where it can be checked. The footer now prints the address of the verification page, above the page number and opposite the Bates stamp. A reader holding one photocopied sheet can now find out that the file can be checked rather than trusted.
  • The download is about 188 MB, up from 98. The backup helper is back in the installer and it does not compress; the fourteen interface languages account for the rest.

0.5.1 (10 August 2026)

  • The installer is signed. Windows names the publisher, BOKART Krzysztof Kowalski, instead of an unknown one, and every executable inside the package is signed, not only the installer. SmartScreen may still interrupt the first run: that panel tracks how many people have downloaded a file, which a new certificate cannot have on its first day, and it is a separate thing from signing. The checksum stays published beside the download.
  • New: check a document somebody sent you. Every screen until now was for the person doing the exporting. This one is for the person on the other end, holding a PDF and the small .sha256 file that came with it. It says whether the two agree, and it says plainly what that means: it compares bytes, so a match shows the document has not changed since its checksum was recorded, and shows nothing about who wrote the messages inside.
  • New: export to RSMF, the format eDiscovery platforms such as Relativity read. The conversation arrives as searchable, taggable records with participants, timestamps and attachments intact, instead of as a PDF somebody has to re-key. Attachments go in as the original files from the phone.
  • New: the export screen says when a backup cannot hold your whole history. Two iPhone settings decide this and neither leaves a trace in a transcript: Messages in iCloud, which keeps older messages in the cloud rather than in the backup, and Keep Messages set to 30 Days or 1 Year, where the phone deleted them outright. Both are read from the backup rather than guessed, and the notice states the span the backup actually covers. On an ordinary backup nothing appears.
  • The Document Integrity page names the database the document came from, by its SHA256. A document could already show it had not changed since it was written; now it can also be tied back to the backup it was made from, by anyone holding that backup.
  • Documents name the transports they contain, "Apple Messages (iMessage, RCS)", instead of always claiming "iMessage / SMS". Since iOS 18 a green bubble can be RCS rather than SMS, so the old fixed line mislabelled every conversation with an Android phone. CSV exports gain a service column.
  • Fixed: reading a backup no longer writes anything into it. Opening the Messages database, even strictly for reading, made Windows create two working files beside it, and they stayed there. So every export left three files where there had been one, inside the folder the documents describe as untouched. The app now works from its own copy in a temporary folder.

0.5.0 (8 August 2026)

  • Fixed: contact names were missing from conversations that have one. A phone that syncs Contacts from two accounts (an iCloud account and a Google or work account, say) stores every person once per account. The check that stops ChatExport printing the wrong person's name saw those two records as two different people claiming one number, and answered by printing no name at all. On the address book that brought this to light, three quarters of conversations showed a bare phone number where a name belonged, and most contact photos went with them. Two records that agree on the name are now understood to be one person. Where two genuinely different people share a number the number still stands alone, which is the whole point of the check.
  • The app now opens in your computer's language, falling back to English, instead of always opening in Polish. A language you choose yourself still wins and stays chosen.
  • The folder your document is saved to is now the thing you click to change it. It sits beside the Export button, where people look for it, with a folder icon and an underline. The separate "Save to" section at the foot of the options page is gone: it was the last of eight sections, which is the hardest place to put the one setting almost everybody checks, and it said what the line by the button already said.
  • The app now explains what it needs before you can export anything. The screen you reach when no backup exists yet shows the four steps in order (plug in the cable, install Apple Devices, back up to this PC, export) and underneath them the part nobody could have guessed: the export reads a backup file from your disk, so once that file exists your iPhone does not need to stay connected. The backup instructions now also say that a first backup can take up to half an hour, before you start it rather than after twenty silent minutes.
  • The download is 97 MB instead of 167 MB. The experimental automatic-backup helper, which was 74 MB of that, no longer ships in the installer. Making the backup in Apple's own app was always the recommended path and is unchanged.

0.4.0 (4 August 2026)

  • The download is 167 MB instead of 185 MB. The Windows build was carrying Chromium's own menu and error text in 55 languages while ChatExport speaks two, and three libraries shipped several copies of themselves where only one is ever used. Nothing about the program or the documents it writes changes.
  • An English document now writes the time as 9:15 AM, not 09:15. That covers every time the document prints: delivery and read receipts, photo captions, and the moment of export on the title page. The other thirteen document languages keep the 24-hour clock, which is what each of them uses. There is no setting for it, because the clock belongs to the language you chose for the document exactly as the spelling of the date does, and a reader who has to convert 21:15 in a document meant to be cited is a reader who can introduce an error of their own. CSV keeps full ISO timestamps for whatever reads them.
  • Fixed: reactions could be printed as separate messages. An emoji or sticker reaction added in iOS 18 was written into the document as a message of its own instead of being attached to the message it answered, and was counted in the conversation list, where it could appear as a thread's newest line. It now travels with the message it belongs to.
  • Fixed: a name could be printed against the wrong person's messages. Two contacts whose numbers ended in the same nine digits were told apart by luck. A number that matches more than one contact now resolves to no name at all and the document prints the number, which is never wrong. A number carrying its country code still finds its contact.
  • Cancel now stops a PDF while a page is being drawn, not only between pages. Clicking it partway through a slow page used to do nothing visible until that page finished. A PDF export that stops responding is also given up on and retried once, instead of leaving a progress bar that never moves again.
  • Exporting a very long conversation no longer freezes the window just before the export starts, and clicking between conversations is no longer held up by searching and keyword analysis you did not ask to wait for.
  • The experimental automatic backup now names the iPhone it is copying. With one phone connected it stays with that phone even if another is plugged in mid-run; with two or more it stops and says how many it found, rather than choosing one and producing a document about the wrong person's messages.

0.3.0 (3 August 2026)

  • WhatsApp chats can be imported. The file WhatsApp's own "Export chat" button produces (a zip with media, or a bare text file, from an iPhone or an Android phone) now opens like any conversation and exports to every format. The title page names the source file and prints its SHA256. Messages WhatsApp marked as edited or deleted are labelled as exactly that: the program never invents a timestamp the file does not contain.
  • The exported document can be written in fourteen languages. The document's language is now chosen separately from the app's, so you can work in English and hand a German court a German PDF. New alongside English and Polish: German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Czech, Romanian, Swedish, Ukrainian and Russian. Every date, label and statistic in each language was written for it, not machine-translated.
  • Faster on large archives. Opening a backup and generating a PDF both got quicker, and the conversation list stays smooth with thousands of threads.
  • The installer lost 17 MB of build leftovers that should never have shipped.
  • Fixed: in dark mode the document-language menu drew white text on a white list.
  • One honest limitation: keyword highlights are offered only when the document is in Polish, because the word lists for the other languages do not exist yet. A half-translated apparatus in a court document would be worse than none.

0.2.0 (2 August 2026)

The first public release, so this entry is the baseline rather than a list of changes: iPhone Messages (SMS, MMS, RCS and iMessage) exported to PDF, TXT, HTML and CSV, with photos and attachments. Two PDF styles, a chat view and a court view. Encrypted backups are read after you type their password. The download is a free trial: exports carry a watermark and stop at the 50 most recent messages in a conversation until a licence lifts both.