The popular messenger application, WhatsApp, recently cut support for Android 2.1 and 2.2, iOS 6 and Windows Phone 7. It had previously mentioned this move earlier in the year in a blog post. Telegram has followed suit in cutting Android 2.2 support, but has decided to cut even further and nix Android 2.3 and 3.0 too; now users must be running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich or above.
In WhatsApp’s cull, iOS 6 support was also removed; luckily for Telegram users still running iOS 6, updates will still be provided for the time being. Although not mentioned by Telegram, their motives for ending support of such old platforms is to enable the software to get more features which require a new operating system.
As a workaround, users could try Telegram’s web version which should work in most browsers. Additionally, there are also desktop clients for the three major operating systems: Windows, Mac and Linux.
Android 2.2, 2.3 and 3.0 devices make up around 1.4% of the Android usage share – about 19,600,000 devices. Telegram boasts about 100 million users, well below WhatsApp’s one billion users. Despite WhatsApp cutting less Android version from its supported devices roster, it’ll still likely impact more users than Telegram’s wider cuts, based on the sheer volume of WhatsApp users compared to Telegram users.