WhatsApp to stop working on millions of smartphones worldwide in 2020
- Posted on
- Comment
| WhatsApp will stop working on millions of phones in the next couple of months as the company withdraws support for some older mobile platforms. From February 1, 2020, any iPhone running iOS 8 or older will no longer be supported, along with any Android device running version 2.3.7 or older. Users of these operating systems are already unable to create new WhatsApp accounts or re-verify existing accounts. Furthermore, WhatsApp is withdrawing support for all Windows phones from December 31, 2019 — the same month that Microsoft ends support of its Windows 10 Mobile OS. WhatsApp said ‘because we no longer actively develop for these operating systems, some features might stop functioning at any time’. The Facebook-owned messenger service will continue to provide support for devices running Android 4.0.3 onwards and iPhones running iOS 9 and onwards. ‘On iOS 8, you can no longer create new accounts or reverify existing accounts,’ the company said in a blog post. ‘If WhatsApp is currently active on your iOS 8 device, you’ll be able to use it until February 1, 2020.’ Select phones running Linux-operated KaiOS 2.5.1 and older, including JioPhone and JioPhone 2, are also still supported. WhatsApp has been gradually phasing out support for various smartphone platforms that ‘don’t offer the kind of capabilities we need to expand our app’s features in the future’. In a previous post, WhatsApp had 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.’ WhatsApp is the latest casualty of Microsoft’s almost defunct Windows 10 Mobile operating system. Earlier this year, Microsoft itself even suggested that Windows 10 Mobile users should switch to Android or iOS devices because of its lack of app support. Windows Phone operating system was launched in October 2010 and then succeeded by Windows 10 Mobile in 2015. In 2017, Microsoft announced that work on Windows 10 Mobile was drawing to a close due to lack of market penetration and a dearth of interest from app developers. It will officially stop supporting Windows 10 Mobile, previously referred to as Windows Phone, starting December 10, 2019. Facebook withdrew its Facebook, Messenger and Instagram apps from Windows phones back in April. Microsoft started gutting its phone business in 2016, making thousands of job cuts and the decision to drop the company’s mantra ‘mobile-first, cloud-first’. One key problem for the company was the lack of apps on the mobile platform. In April, Facebook deserted Windows Phones. Skype and WhatsApp had also withdrawn their services from phones run on Windows. The operating system dipped to a 0.3 per cent of the market share by the end of Microsoft’s third financial quarter in 2016. Critics have claimed that the apps available on Windows phones pale in comparison to their iOS and Android counterparts. In June 2019, it emerged that Microsoft advised Windows 10 Mobile users to switch to Android or iPhone. |
| Source: Dailymail |
ABOUT: Nana Kwesi Coomson
[email protected] An Entrepreneur, Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Communications Executive and Philanthropist. Editor-in-Chief of www.233times.com. A Senior Journalist with Ghanaian Chronicle Newspaper. An alumnus of Adisadel College where he read General Arts. His first degree is in Bachelor of Arts - Political Science (major) and History (minor) from the University of Ghana. He holds MSc in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Energy with Public Relations (PR) from the Robert Gordon University in the United Kingdom. He is a 2018 Mandela Washington Fellow who studied at Clark Atlanta University in USA on the Business and Entrepreneurship track.
View all posts by: Nana Kwesi Coomson
(Selorm) | 
(Nana Kwesi)