WhatsApp has now stopped working on several older mobile platforms including Windows Phone 7, Android 2.1, 2.2, and iOS 6. The action was announced near the beginning of last year but the plans to drop support for BlackBerry OS, BlackBerry 10, Nokia S40 and Nokia Symbian S60 have been pushed back to June 30, 2017.
In the statement issued last year, WhatsApp wrote:
“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… 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.”
The discontinuation of WhatsApp is significant mainly because the messenger is the most used in the world today, touting over 1 billion users as of February last year. There are approximately 1.4 million Android 2.2 devices according to Google’s own figures; with WhatsApp closing the door on this version, a significant number of users will be affected.
The trade-off for WhatsApp ending support for thousands of users will be more new features that older platforms were simply incapable of supporting. With so many alternative messenger apps, WhatsApp will need the ability to add new features regularly as to keep in step with the likes of Telegram messenger which is very aggressive when it comes to implementing new capabilities.
Source: WhatsApp