If you are one of the few people still clinging to your Blackberry or some other outdated mobile device, you have yet another reason to upgrade: by the end of the year WhatsApp will no longer support old, outdated technology.
The world’s most popular app will cease to work with BlackBerry (including BlackBerry 10), the Nokia S40, the Nokia Symbian S60, Android 2.1, Android 2.2 and Windows Phone 7.1 by December of this year.
The Facebook-owned messaging application, which turned seven last week, announced in a blog post:
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.
There are certainly few things more frustrating than working with outdated technology, but not being able to message on your mobile device will surely drive consumers to the store for iPhones, Galaxy devices and One Pluses.
So, the bad news for some consumers will surely be great news for tech retailers this year.