WhatsApp Compatible smartphones: Whatsapp will be no longer available on the old smartphones from January next year. The android phones operating on Android 2.2 Froyo, iPhone running iOS 6, Windows 7 or an even older version will not be compatible with WhatsApp from next year onwards which the company had announced in February 2016. Roughly, the smartphones that launched 5 years ago or are even older would not remain compatible with WhatsApp.
WhatsApp Compatible smartphones – The messaging app won’t support old versions of operating systems
The older versions of the various operating systems do not “offer the kind of capabilities we need to expand our app’s features in the future”, said WhatsApp in its blog post.
“While these mobile devices have been an important part of our story, they do not offer the kind of capabilities we need to expand our app’s features in the future…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.”
-WhatsApp
The company said, “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.”
A few more operating systems that Whatsapp would not be supporting from June 2017 onwards are BlackBerry OS, BlackBerry 10 OS, Nokia S40, and Nokia Symbian S60.
