Sad news for all Blackberry and Nokia users, however tiny their population is, WhatsApp has decided to drop support for BlackBerry 10, Nokia S40, and Nokia Symbian S60 by the end of this year or early 2017. But that isn’t all. More platforms to suffer are Android 2.1, 2.2 and Windows Phone 7.1
This is for the good in fact, now they can focus more on features supported by newer platforms.
“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”
They were accurate while stating how these devices played an important part in their story, considering 70% of the world used Blackberry and Nokia back when the company started. You’ll be surprised to know that now less than 0.5% of the market is Blackberry or Nokia and Google stated that only 0.1% of Android users are running Froyo.
“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”
We think it won’t be easy, considering a large part of India still uses handsets with those ancient platforms, and WhatsApp is a major part of their social life. But no ones at fault here. This had to happen sooner or later and it’s obviously for the better of the 99.5% using Android or iOS or Windows.
