WhatsApp will discontinue support for BlackBerry-made operating systems, including BlackBerry 10, by the end of 2016, the Facebook-owned company announced late Friday afternoon.
Citing the shifting mobile landscape, the company says it wants to focus its efforts on operating systems the majority of mobile phone owners use.
“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,” says the blog post accompanying the announcement. “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 will also discontinue support for Windows Phone 7.1, Nokia’s S40 and S60 operating systems, as well as Android 2.1 and 2.2 by the end of 2016.
Somewhere, the 0.1 percent of Android users who thought they would never have to upgrade from Froyo are cursing the inevitable march of time.
[source]WhatsApp[/source]
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