WhatsApp Pulling Support for Older Devices, Operating Systems
What do BlackBerry (including BlackBerry 10), the Nokia S40, the Nokia Symbian S60, Android 2.1, Android 2.2 and Windows Phone 7.1 have in common?
What do BlackBerry (including BlackBerry 10), the Nokia S40, the Nokia Symbian S60, Android 2.1, Android 2.2 and Windows Phone 7.1 have in common?
By the end of 2016, WhatsApp will no longer support those devices and platforms, the Facebook-owned messaging application announced in a blog post.
The app, which turned seven last week, recommended that users of those older technologies upgrade by year-end to continue using WhatsApp, saying in its blog post:
When we started WhatsApp in 2009, people’s use of mobile devices looked very different from today. The Apple iTunes App Store was only a few months old. About 70 percent of smartphones sold at the time had operating systems offered by BlackBerry and Nokia. Mobile operating systems offered by Google, Apple and Microsoft–which account for 99.5 percent of sales today–were on less than 25 percent of mobile devices sold at the time.
While these mobile devices have been an important part of our story, they don’t offer the kind of capabilities we need to expand our app’s features in the future.
This was a tough decision for us to make, but the right one in order to give people better ways to keep in touch with friends, family and loved ones using WhatsApp.
Readers: Are any of you using WhatsApp on any of the listed devices or operating systems?
Image of obsolete cell phones courtesy of Shutterstock.
