Sometimes you may keep getting the message “Initializing, please wait a moment” for hours on WhatsApp on your phone. This can happen if you moved the sim card from an Android phone to an iPhone and used WhatsApp on the iPhone for few days. Now after moving the simcard back to the old Android phone above “Initializing, please wait a moment” message won't complete and WhatsApp gets stuck.
I contacted WhatsApp support and they asked to uninstall and reinstall WhatsApp on the Android phone. After reinstalling WhatsApp and entering phone number on the WhatsApp screen, it prompts to ask if you want to restore messages from a backup. IMPORTANT: Click YES as this is the only time you can get back your old WhatsApp messages and data from Google backup. After that it asks for your Google account and also click Yes to restore from Google backup. After that it successfully restored the old messages and WhatsApp was working normally and can see all my old chat history messages.
Originally published at http://plenium.wordpress.com on January 16, 2020.
