Are there FOSS apps that can view whatsapp exported chat `.zip` file?

Current solutions are web based and those come with limitations.

Search for ZipXtract.

Isn’t zip an archive? What’s inside that?

should be able to unzip it for you, I don’t use whatsapp so can’t help beyond that.

These unzipping solutions are the right answer. All you need to do is get it open. The inside should be a .txt file that should be plain text you can extract however you’d like.

it should litterally look like

“23/03/2025, 14:32 - Tear: hey did you see the new proxmox update“