Nothing lasts forever — including software support. If you’re still rocking a device with Windows Phone 7.1 or Android 2.2 and love WhatsApp, I have some bad news for you: It’s time to upgrade, for the sake of your chatting future.
A few days ago, WhatsApp announced that it will be dropping support for several older mobile platforms, in an effort to simplify security updates and feature additions.
Here’s the list of affected operating systems:
BlackBerry, including BlackBerry 10
Nokia S40
Nokia Symbian S60
Android 2.1 and Android 2.2
Windows Phone 7.1
As Daniel Tyson over at Ausdroid explains, this really shouldn’t affect many people at all. For example, Android 2.2 currently makes up 0.1 per cent of users, going by Google’s own numbers.
Tyson however does go on to make an excellent point — WhatsApp has quite the following in “developing markets”, where users often don’t have the latest and greatest hardware. So this change could have a larger impact than first appears.
That said, I’m sure WhatsApp collects its own metrics and has a good idea of the numbers. I doubt it would have dropped support for the aforementioned platforms if it was going to cripple its userbase.