ChatExport changelog

Each release, newest first, and what it changed. The download page always serves the newest version, which today is 0.5.1. 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.

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.