WhatsApp has announced that it will stop supporting BlackBerry, including BlackBerry 10, Symbian S60 and few other older platforms by the end of this year. WhatsApp turned seven years old last week. “As we look ahead to our next seven years, we want to focus our efforts on the mobile platforms the vast majority of people use,” said the company.
Later this year, WhatsApp Messenger will also stop working on devices running on Nokia S40, Android 2.1, Android 2.2 and Windows Phone 7.1. Regarding ending the support for these platforms, WhatsApp, on the official blog, said:
When we started WhatsApp in 2009, people’s use of mobile devices looked very different from today. The Apple 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. 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.