How to read your Facebook data download (JSON) on your phone
You asked Facebook for a copy of your information, picked JSON, and got a zip full of folders your phone won’t open. Here’s which file holds what, why some of the text looks broken, and how to read any of it without a computer.
Short answer
Extract the zip in your file manager, then open the one .json file you actually want in a JSON viewer, which shows it as a readable tree instead of one endless line. Posts, messages, comments and ad interests each live in their own file. If you only want to browse your history, request the HTML copy instead — it opens in any browser.
Get Sonnet free Reads the files offline, nothing uploaded.
JSON or HTML: which one should you ask for?
Meta offers both formats, and they hold the same information. The choice is about what you plan to do with it.
- HTML opens in a web browser as ordinary pages that look roughly like Facebook did. Pick it if you just want to scroll through your old posts and messages.
- JSON is structured data. It is the one to pick if you want to count things, move the data into a spreadsheet or another app, feed it to a script, or check exactly which fields Facebook holds about you. It is the machine-readable copy, the one meant for moving your information into another tool.
Picked the wrong one? You can request the export again in the other format. Nothing stops you from having both.
1. Request the download on your phone
In the Facebook app, open the menu, then Settings & privacy → Settings → Accounts Center → Your information and permissions → Download your information, and start a new export. Meta renames these screens regularly — the same place has also been labelled “Export your information”, with a Create export button — but Accounts Center has been the stable entry point.
Before you confirm, you get to choose the date range, which information to include, the format, and the media quality. Choose only the categories you want. A full export with every photo and video is the difference between a file you can keep on your phone and one you can’t: archives in the wild run from roughly a hundred megabytes to a few gigabytes, and almost all of that weight is media, not JSON. Ask for messages alone and you get something small enough to read on a phone.
The export is not instant. Facebook prepares it in the background and notifies you when the download link is ready.
2. Unzip it on Android
- Tap the link in the notification or email. The file lands in Downloads as a
.zip. - Open Files by Google or whatever file manager your phone came with, and tap the zip.
- Tap Extract. You get a folder — usually named
facebook-followed by your username — with subfolders inside, one per kind of information.
If your phone says it can’t open the .json file you find inside, that’s a file-type association problem, not a broken file: Android has no JSON viewer of its own. It’s the same “no app can open this file” wall people hit with a JSON attachment from email or WhatsApp.
3. Which file holds what
Facebook has reorganised this archive several times, and file names carry version baggage, so treat the names below as a guide and go by the folder you’re standing in. Numbered suffixes like _1 are chunks: if you see message_1.json or your_posts_1.json, look for _2 and _3 next to them and open each one.
| You want | Look for |
|---|---|
| Your posts, check-ins and uploads | your_posts__check_ins__photos_and_videos_1.json in newer exports; your_posts.json / your_posts_1.json in older ones |
| Messenger conversations | A messages folder with an inbox inside it, one subfolder per conversation holding message_1.json |
| Comments you’ve written | comments.json, in a comments folder |
| Photo albums | An album folder with one numbered file per album, starting at 0.json |
| What Facebook thinks you like | ads_interests.json, next to advertisers_who_uploaded_a_contact_list_with_your_information.json |
| Apps and sites you logged into | apps_and_websites.json and posts_from_apps_and_websites.json |
| People you interacted with most | interactions/people.json |
| Profiles and pages you visited | visited.json |
| Contacts Facebook took from a phone | your_address_books.json |
File and folder names collected in October 2026 from open-source projects that parse real exports: sbaack/FacebookQuantifier (which reads message_1.json, comments.json, interactions/people.json and visited.json), numbersprotocol/fb-json2table (the ads_interests, apps_and_websites, your_address_books and your_posts names), uttamo/messenger-data-analysis (the messages/inbox/<conversation>/message_1.json layout) and the Facebook export provider in imbue-ai/datalib, whose author tested it against an export taken in June 2026 and found the long your_posts__check_ins__photos_and_videos_1.json name and the numbered album files. Facebook changes this layout, so check what you actually have.
4. Open the file in a JSON viewer
Tap the .json file and pick Sonnet under Open with, or open Sonnet and tap Open file. One long line becomes a tree you can fold and unfold. A Messenger conversation, for example, is an object with the people in it and then a list of messages:
{
"participants": [ { "name": "Alex Doe" } ],
"messages": [
{
"sender_name": "Alex Doe",
"timestamp_ms": 1759665600000,
"content": "see you there",
"type": "Generic"
}
]
}
An illustrative message. The exact fields vary by export version and by what the conversation contained.
If you’ve never looked inside one of these files before, what a JSON file actually is covers the braces, the brackets and why everything is in quotes.
Why the text looks garbled, and other oddities
Accented letters and emoji come out mangled
Open a conversation with any non-English text in it and you may find é showing as é, and emoji as runs of nonsense symbols. Your data isn’t damaged and your viewer isn’t broken. Facebook’s JSON export has been writing the raw bytes of UTF-8 characters as if they were separate characters for years, so every decoder that follows the rules shows the mangled version. Repair libraries exist for it, and tools that analyse these archives normally include a fix-up step. The HTML copy doesn’t have the problem — one more reason to request HTML if reading is all you want.
Timestamps are big numbers
Messenger stores time in a field named timestamp_ms: milliseconds since 1 January 1970, UTC. Other files use plain timestamp, the same count in seconds, so it is three digits shorter. Either way, paste it into any “unix timestamp converter” to get a date, dividing the millisecond one by 1,000 first if the converter expects seconds.
Each file has one key, then a long list
Most of these files are shaped the same way: a single top-level key naming the activity, holding a list of entries. That’s why the tree view helps so much — fold the top key and you can see how many entries you have before reading any of them.
Is the export too big for your phone?
Almost always, no. The gigabytes in a full archive are photos and videos; the JSON files beside them are plain text, and if you asked for one or two categories they are small. The exceptions are a conversation you have been having for a decade, and a posts file covering fifteen years.
For scale, Sonnet opens a file as a full tree up to about 2 MB, and anything up to 20 MB as formatted text, for free. Sonnet Pro, a one-time unlock, raises that to 50 MB files with the tree up to about 30 MB. Past 50 MB, no phone viewer is the right tool, including this one — opening a large JSON file on Android names what to use instead and when to give in and use a computer.
Before you upload the zip anywhere
Plenty of websites and apps offer to turn your Facebook archive into charts, a timeline or a searchable notebook if you just upload the zip. Look at what that zip contains first: your private messages, the contacts Facebook pulled from your phone, the sites you logged into and your security history. That is a lot to hand a stranger in exchange for a word cloud.
If you do want a tool like that, request a fresh export limited to the one category it needs. And if all you want is to read a file, read it on the phone — a local viewer never sends anything anywhere. The same caution applies to an Instagram data download, which comes from the same Accounts Center and has the same mixture of personal data in one zip.
Read your data, keep it on your phone
Sonnet opens JSON files as a collapsible tree, entirely offline. Nothing you open is uploaded. No ads, no account. Free on Google Play, with an optional one-time Pro unlock for bigger files.
