The developers of Whatsapp are trying hard to cope up with the changing needs and in order to better support other mobile operating systems, the team will discontinue support for Windows Phone 8 and Blackberry 10 OS.
Both these operating systems are pretty outdated by now and there is no reason to continue supporting it. Besides, the user base has considerably reduced as most of them have skipped Blackberry while the rest have shifted to Windows Phone 10. Microsoft has officially confirmed that they have stopped supporting WP10 which marks the end of Windows Phones as a mobile operating system.
The development team of Whatsapp discontinued support for Nokia phones that were running on Symbian S60. The support ended on June 30th this year. They have now confirmed that the app will not work on Blackberry OS, BB 10 and Windows Phone 8 from December 31st onwards. From 2018, the company plans to focus their resources towards the more happening platforms and roll out a bunch of pending updates.
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Some of the expected features include the ability to reply individually to a person from a group conversation, picture in picture mode on Android 8.0 Oreo platform and business specific version of Whatsapp to make it easier to communicate in an office environment. The team has rolled out multiple features on both iOS and Android platforms but many of them are being enabled in lots so that they don’t cause any performance issues on these devices.
In their official statement, the company wrote, “We have decided to not support actively for these platforms and some of the existing features may stop abruptly. So, we would request our users to switch to a more recent operating system for an optimal experience. The platform limits our capabilities and doesn’t allow us to expand with the kind of features we like to offer which is why we choose to discontinue. You can continue to use it on Android 4.0+, Windows Phone 8.1+ and all iOS7+ devices.”
In their other statement, the company has also confirmed that Whatsapp will stop working on very old Android versions such as Android 2.3.7 Gingerbread from 2020 onwards. While it is evident that a lot of users have already shifted to newer models and there are hardly any smartphones that still run on Android 2.0, it does send a fair message to those who are still planning to make the upgrade.