In a blog post, WhatsApp has announced that it will end support for a number of operating systems and it impacts both Blackberry and some Android users. If you are still using the now rumored to be unsupported Blackberry OS including Blackberry 10 and Android 2.1 and Android 2.2 devices, WhatsApp suggeste you to move on and upgrade to a newer supported platform like newer Android, Windows 10 Mobile (Windows Phone 8.1) and iOS. By end of 2016, WhatsApp will stop supporting the devices running these operating systems.
But anniversary dates are also an opportunity to look back. When we started WhatsApp in 2009, people’s use of mobile devices looked very different from today. The Apple 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.
As we look ahead to our next seven years, we want to focus our efforts on the mobile platforms the vast majority of people use. So, by the end of 2016, we will be ending support for WhatsApp Messenger on the following mobile platforms:
- BlackBerry, including BlackBerry 10
- Nokia S40
- Nokia Symbian S60
- Android 2.1 and Android 2.2
- Windows Phone 7.1
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. If you use one of these affected mobile devices, we recommend upgrading to a newer Android, iPhone, or Windows Phone before the end of 2016 to continue using WhatsApp.
WhatsApp has been adding new features like VOIP calling down the line and claims that these devices mayn’t support its feature expansion in future though lots of Blackberry 10 users may like to disagree.
