The announcement was given earlier this year, and now it is important that all WhatsApp users check their smartphones since they risk to be too old to keep on supporting the app. In February WhatsApp has announced that by the end of 2016 outdated models will not be able to run anymore the service, because the company intends to focus on other newer mobile platforms.
In a blog post, the owners of the app explained that: “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,”.
Apparently this was not an easy decision for the instant messaging service. According to a spokesperson of WhatsApp “While these mobile devices have been an important part of our story, they do not offer the kind of capabilities we need to expand our app’s features in the future,” adding that “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,”.
And we have certainly noticed that during the last few months WhatsApp has received several and major updates, and it seems that other important new features are coming, features that need new models of smartphones. So let’s recap which mobile platforms versions will definitely stop working by the end of December 2016:
Also Blackberry 10 running on BBOS and Nokia S40 running on Symbian S40 are part of this list, but the support has been extended until June 2017.
So remember to check on your device version before the year ends, otherwise you risk to have the service blocked. We are confident that this decision will unlikely affect the success of the app (which now have more than one billion monthly active users), also because the service will still be supported by most of the Android devices. Furthermore, it’s probable that the majority of WhatsApp users will be more than happy to upgrade their devices, and not just in order to use WhatsApp.