WhatsApp Ending Support For Some Older Devices By End Of 2016
If you own an older Nokia or Blackberry smartphone and are an avid user of WhatsApp, you might want to think about your phone’s future: the messaging service plans to end support for several operating systems by the end of the year.
WhatsApp announced the upcoming change on its blog as part of the future outlook for the company following its seventh anniversary last week.
By the end of 2016, WhatsApp will no longer be supported on BlackBerry – including BlackBerry 10; Nokia S40; Nokia Symbian S60; Android 2.1 and Android 2.2; and Windows Phone 7.1.
The company says it came to the decision to drop support for the systems in order to focus its efforts on the platforms that the majority of consumers use, such those offered by Microsoft, Apple, and Google.
“When we started WhatsApp in 2009, people’s use of mobile devices looked very different from today,” WhatsApp said in its blog post. “About 70% of smartphones sold at the time had operating systems offered by BlackBerry and Nokia.”
The landscape is vastly different in 2016, with operating systems offered by Google, Apple and Microsoft now accounting for 99.5% of sales today, according to WhatsApp.
While the company says the older mobile devices will always be a part of its history, “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,” the company says.
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