Reviews

There is one review of ChatExport. One. Not a page of them.

Who wrote it, and what he was given

A beta tester, in September 2026. He found the app through Reddit, runs Windows, and had been paying for a different iPhone message exporter since 2020 (three paid versions of it over six years) before he ever opened mine. He is a genealogist.

He was given a licence for free, with no expiry date, before he wrote a word of this. That is the disclosure this page owes you. His words were not bought with money, but they were not unpaid either, and you should read them knowing it. Nothing was promised in exchange for a favourable review, the licence did not depend on what he said and still does not, and he was asked for permission before any of this went up. He is named at his own agreement: he posts on Reddit as HeckinConcern69, and said yes to both the quotes and the name.

What he said

He had put the same iPhone backup through both programs, the one he had paid for and this one, on the same machine, and compared the results.

I can tell you objectively though, the speed at which messages are recovered/extracted, the speed at which one can search them in the program, the interface itself - absolutely spectacular by comparison […]

The name of the competing program has been cut from that sentence and the cut is marked. Nothing else in it is changed.

holy crap, the pdf and statistics? beautiful. God, that’s just. that’s something else.

His backup held 211 conversations and only 72 of them still had messages in them. The app says so on the conversation list, and that is the part he had not expected:

ChatExport found all 72 conversations PLUS all those the backup is flagging […] I am missing thousands of messages. I would’ve never known that without using your program.

Then he timed both programs on that same backup:

From starting the backup extractor to finish, I still didn’t have my messages after an hour and 45 minutes. It took over two hours just to get them. […] I accomplished the same task with your software in under 15 minutes.

Read that last one for exactly what it is: one run of each program, on one man’s computer, with one unusually large backup: a single conversation of his held 124,915 messages and came out as a 6,777-page PDF. It is his measurement and not a benchmark I ran, and I am not going to dress it up as one.

What went wrong in the same week

This page has promised from the start that an unflattering review would go up as readily as a flattering one. Here is that part, from the same tester.

He found a real bug, and it is still there. In the preview inside the app, a message the iPhone had flagged as deleted was drawn as “Message deleted” even when its text was still sitting in the backup. It was the first thing he reported. The exports never did that (the PDF and the TXT print the real wording and mark the date it was deleted), but the preview lied to him on screen, and the preview is exactly where he was looking. It is a display fault, nothing was lost, and it did not make the 1.0 release either.

He asked for something the app still cannot do:

you might want to make a multi-pdf option, because my conversation even with two years of messages missing is a 6777 page pdf […] and unfortunately that makes searching nearly impossible

He is right and it is not built. Past a certain size a PDF stops being searchable by a person on an ordinary machine, which is a failure of the one thing this app claims to be good at. Splitting a long export into volumes, with page numbers running unbroken across them, is on the list.

One more thing belongs here, because he established it himself and it clears the app rather than condemning it. The complaint he started with (thousands of missing messages) turned out not to be the app at all. He had backed up an old iPhone that had not pulled its messages down from iCloud in years. His words: “it was more user ignorance on my part with icloud syncing than your program on the bug end, for sure”. He asked for a guide on preparing a phone before backing it up, and that guide exists now.

Why there is only one

The licence went on sale in August 2026, and the people who have run the app are still a small group of early users, testers and first customers. Most of them have not been asked. This page fills up as they answer, or it stays short. Reviews here will never be bought, never written in-house, and never held back for being unflattering. If that ever changes, this paragraph is the first thing that has to change with it.

What you can check instead

You are probably here to work out whether this is a real product, and other people’s words are the usual shortcut. There is one person’s here, which is not many, so here is everything you can check for yourself without asking me anything.

• Sample exports: real documents the app produced, opened in your own reader. No email address required.
• The FAQ: what the app does, and what it does not do yet, including macOS.
• Security: what happens to your messages and to your backup password.
• Privacy: every script this website loads, named.
• About: who wrote this, and why.

If you are using the app

I would like to publish what you thought of it, good or otherwise. Write to support@getchatexport.com and tell me what you exported and what did not work. I will ask before publishing anything, and you can be credited by first name only.