WhatsApp Ceases Support for Older Operating Systems

WhatsApp users on devices with older operating systems were on the receiving end of a New Year’s Eve surprise.

Manish Singh of Mashable reported that the Facebook-owned messaging application no longer supports:

• Android 2.2 Froyo or older versions of Android
• iOS 6 or older
• Windows Phone 7 or earlier

Singh added that the following operating systems are heading for WhatsApp’s chopping block in June:

• BlackBerry 10 OS
• Nokia S40
• Nokia Symbian S60

WhatsApp announced these steps in a blog post last February, writing at the time:

When we started WhatsApp in 2009, people’s use of mobile devices looked very different from today. The Apple iTunes 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.

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.

Readers: What are your thoughts on these moves by WhatsApp?

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