WhatsApp has announced that it’s going to end support for several operating systems which include Blackberry and Nokia operating system. iOS and Android are the two mobile operating systems that are dominating the smartphone OS markets. Even though struggling, Windows Phone, still exists. The support for Nokia S40, and Nokia Symbian S60 and the older versions of Android 2.1 and 2.2 or Windows Phone 7.1 will be ended by the end of 2016. WhatsApp celebrated its glorious seven years very recently and it’s that time when the company made the following announcements.
“When we started WhatsApp in 2009, people’s use of mobile devices looked very different from today,” the announcement read. “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. 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.”
Windows 7.1, Nokia OS and BlackBerry hold a market share which is considerable. But the reason cited by WhatsApp is that these OSes and the older versions of Android do not offer the functionalities and capabilities that are mandatory to expand the app versions. Hence they took the decision to remove support from the above mentioned operating systems.
