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WhatsApp Drops Support for Blackberry and other old OS

Today WhatsApp announced that it will no longer support a number of older device operating systems because it wishes to focus any development "on the mobile platforms the vast majority of people use." 


crackberry
The operating systems said to be affected by this include Blackberry 10 and a variety of Nokia, Windows and Android systems. 

The majority of these operating systems are known as "legacy operating systems," which means updates are no longer produced and new devices are not installed with it. However this does NOT include Blackberry 10, which is still used, updated and developed by Blackberry themselves, as a relatively new OS (launched in Jan 2013).

WhatsApp have announced that they are going to stop supporting these systems by the end of 2016. 

Whilst the Facebook owned company said that Blackberry don't make up enough of their market, it's interesting to note that Blackberry sold 7 million phones in 2014. Whilst it is unclear how many people will be affected at this stage, it will quite easily be at least tens of millions of phones that will be without WhatsApp. 

The company wrote some worldly advice in their blog post for these people. It seems to be "get a newer phone" which is pretty insensitive and insincere: "If you use one of these affected mobile devices, we recommend upgrading to a newer Android, iPhone, or Windows Phone before the end of 2016 to continue using WhatsApp.”

Whether WhatsApp doing this will open a niche in the market for other messenger apps or whether it will effect sales of Blackberry, we simply do not know.

For the rest of us, we look forward to these exciting "developments" that the old phones were simply not capable of handling. 

WhatsApp does say farewell and thank you for "the important part" these operating systems played in their story. For the full list of OS affected by the decision see below:

- Android 2.1
- Android 2.2
- Blackberry OS 7 or earlier
- Blackberry 10
- Nokia S40
- Nokia Symbian S60
- Windows Phone 7.1



Megan is a longstanding content writer for Social Songbird as well as the company’s social media manager. Her job is to not only write about social media but also grow and maintain the Songbird Facebook and Twitter pages. She enjoys long tweets in the rain and snuggling up to cat videos. Follow her @MeganAtSMF 


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WhatsApp Drops Support for Blackberry and other old OS Reviewed by Unknown on Tuesday, March 01, 2016 Rating: 5
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