Arghh, iphone to Android Whatsapp message transfer

[CJay]

OK, so I've had and used Android phones almost exclusively for the past five or so years and have never had problems.

But, my partner is a new convert after a dreadful experience with the iPhone 6 (i don't want a platform war, Android works for me, iPhone worked for her until recently and we were both happy with the choices we'd made)

So, where we are stuck is in transferring all her Whatsapp chats to the new phone, there seems to be no mechanism to do this?

We can back them up to iCloud on the iPhone, I can back mine up to Google Drivebut it seems never the twain shall meet and there's no way to transfer them between, there are plenty of 'guides' out there which are essentiall just ads for rather expensive applicatons of rather dubious facility, some of them require one or both phones to be rooted.

Does anyone here know of a way to transfer the whatsapp message store or if it's even possible?

 (the conversations are especially important as one of them is with a friend who died last year )