Get Notification History for Android on your device and install it here: Download Notification History for Android.
2. Once the app is downloaded, users can easily search for messages in the Android notification log. Users using third-party launchers like Nova Launcher can search for messages more easily.
3. Access the notification log without installing any third-party apps. Long press on the home screen, then tap on Widgets => Activities => Settings => Notification log. You can then access the system notification log.
4. In the stock Android version, Settings widget also provides users with access to the notification log.
Using a third-party app like Notification History has some limitations. Users can only access messages accompanied by notifications on the device and viewed or interacted with notifications.
In this case, interaction could also mean swiping notifications on the notification bar. Users will see at least part of the message content when swiping notifications. The notification log only saves messages on the device, and after the device restarts, the log will be cleared.
Furthermore, another limitation of the aforementioned method is restricting to display only the first 100 characters of the deleted messages. This feature is only available for Android users 7.0 and above. Users can only access text messages, meaning any other multimedia files cannot be recovered.
This is not the first case reporting about the feature of recalling deleted messages. Last year, Jonathan Zdziarski, an iOS operating system expert, discovered that WhatsApp stored conversation logs on the device even though these conversations were deleted or archived.
Of course, if you have interacted and swiped the message notification, as requested in exploiting notification history as Android Jefe exploited, you can read those messages even though they have been deleted. Clearly, this is a new vulnerability in WhatsApp.
In most cases, users utilize the Delete for Everyone feature when mistakenly sending a wrong message or inappropriate message content. Delete for Everyone is the latest feature added to WhatsApp among the features introduced and added to the instant messaging app.
Additionally, you can also explore the steps to backup WhatsApp messages with important conversations you want to preserve on your device. With this WhatsApp message backup method, we can conveniently and comprehensively backup any images appearing in the conversation.
