METHODOLOGY
Every dramatic-looking result should have a boring, explainable calculation behind it.
Unpack My Chat publishes the boring rules behind the dramatic-looking results. These are measurement definitions from the product itself, not relationship psychology.
Analyse my chatHow to exportParsing exported messages
The analyser recognises common Android and iPhone WhatsApp text-export patterns, including multiline messages. Lines that cannot be confidently attributed to a timestamped message are tracked so the report can warn about parsing uncertainty.
Conversation sessions
Long gaps divide the history into separate conversation sessions. Session boundaries are used for metrics such as conversation starters and reply gaps so offline time is not treated as ordinary response behaviour.
Reply timing
A reply gap is measured when the sender changes inside the session threshold. Same-sender consecutive messages are handled separately.
Streaks and silences
A messaging streak counts consecutive calendar days with at least one parsed message. The longest silence is the largest timestamp gap between parsed messages in the export.
Words, phrases and emoji
Word counts tokenize message text and filter common stop words. Phrase counts look for repeated wording or explicit phrase matches. Emoji are counted from characters present in the message text. The analyser does not claim that repetition automatically identifies an inside joke, nickname or emotional state.
What is not inferred
Unpack My Chat does not claim to detect cheating, diagnose attachment style, calculate relationship compatibility or infer a breakup probability from message statistics. Those claims require evidence the exported timestamps and text counts cannot provide reliably.
The exact one-hour conversation rule
A new conversation session starts when the gap from the previous parsed message is more than 60 minutes. If the next message arrives within 60 minutes and the sender changes, that gap contributes to the new sender’s reply-time statistics. Consecutive messages from the same sender are counted separately as same-sender runs rather than replies.
Full-history handling and the 120,000-message test
The analyzer itself does not impose a 10,000-message or 100-day ceiling. The automated test suite builds and parses a 120,000-message fixture spanning more than 1,000 days, then checks that all 120,000 messages reach the report. That is an engineering stress test, not a promise that every phone or browser can process unlimited file sizes.
The real history available to analyze depends on what WhatsApp includes in the export. Unpack My Chat therefore shows the earliest and latest exported dates and avoids claiming that an export is complete when the file cannot prove it contains the first-ever message.
How multiple exports are merged
When you add older exports, messages are compared by timestamp, sender and exact message text. Overlapping snapshots are deduplicated while legitimate repeated messages inside the same source are preserved by occurrence count. The merged timeline is then sorted chronologically before analysis.
What Unpack My Chat is
Unpack My Chat is a browser-based analyzer for exported WhatsApp chats. It currently accepts WhatsApp ZIP or TXT exports only. It does not connect to a WhatsApp account, does not export chats on a user’s behalf, and does not currently analyse Telegram, Messenger or other messaging platforms.
Try Unpack My Chat
Export a WhatsApp conversation without media, choose the ZIP or TXT export and turn the history into an X-Ray, Time Machine and Chat Museum.
Open the analyzer