Termination of services for early hosts by end of 2016.
By Dileep Thekkethil
Facebook-owned app WhatsApp has completed seven years of supremacy in the Instant Messaging industry and now the company has announced that it’s time to stop supporting its early hosts, the BlackBerry, Nokia S40, Symbian S60, Android 2.1 and Android 2.2, and Windows Phone 7.1.
According to the official blog of WhatsApp, about 70 percent of the smartphones sold at the time of its inception ran on either Blackberry or the Nokia Symbian.
That scenario soon changed and new players took advantage of the industry, which resulted in the spike in the number of smartphones run using operating systems offered by Google, Apple and Microsoft – which account for 99.5 percent of sales today.
WhatsApp, which is trying to constantly improve its security and offer users with addictive features said on the seventh anniversary, the company will focus working on the mobile platforms that are vastly used by people across the world.
As a result of this, the company says “by the end of 2016, we will be ending support for WhatsApp Messenger on the following mobile platforms”
- BlackBerry, including BlackBerry 10
- Nokia S40
- Nokia Symbian S60
- Android 2.1 and Android 2.2
- Windows Phone 7.1
According to the company, these platforms were once the integral part of the app but it says these platforms doesn’t offer the capabilities that need to expand the features that the company plans to offer its users in the future.
For people who are still using WhatsApp on the BlackBerry and Nokia Symbian platforms, WhatsApp recommends moving to a newer device by the end of the year that supports Android, iOS or Windows operating systems.
WhatsApp currently has over a billion users globally out of which a major chunk of them are from emerging markets such as India, where many people still use old Nokia and Blackberry smartphones.
According to latest figures, 42 billion messages, 1.6 billion photos and 250 million videos are being shared through WhatsApp on a daily basis. In addition, to this, the IM app has over 1 billion groups.
A majority of WhatsApp users are spread across developing nations such as Brazil, India and Russia.
In India WhatsApp has strong competitors such as LINE, Viber and Hike.