After coming up with a couple of nifty features, the most popular messaging app WhatsApp, owned by social media giant Facebook, clearly mentioned in their official blog that they are drawing a conclusion to obsolete their existing services from new year on BlackBerry 10 OS and Windows 8.0 devices.
It was announced first a year back to stop their journey on these platforms. However, later this decision was changed and the deadline was extended to June 30, 2017, where they already stopped the services for Nokia Symbian S60. It was later pushed further to December 31, 2017.
Moreover, anybody who is still using devices like Nokia Symbian S40 will no longer be able to access the WhatsApp messaging services on their devices from 31st December, 2018. Along with that, WhatsApp also mentioned on their blog that the devices which are running on Android version 2.3.7 and any other version older than Gingerbread will also get disconnected from their services on 1st February, 2020.
According to the company, putting an end to their services on BlackBerry and Windows phone was really a tough decision. However, there are many points which stand strong with this reasonable statement. WhatsApp at first is a widespread messaging app used by more than a billion users, and to optimize thei user experience, they frequently release new updates to improve their extensive functionality and features.
Still there are many backdated versions active on multiple platforms on this massive user base and managing them is extremely infeasible. Apart from these, there are many scenarios where transferring users’ old chat history from an older platform to a newer one isn’t possible. And WhatsApp itself doesn’t let you send them via an email attachments.
This time the users won’t see any further extensions of this aforementioned deadline. So, if anybody who wants to continue using the messaging services of WhatsApp obviously don’t have any options left other than upgrading their daily drivers to a newer device with any of the compatible OS like Android, iOS, and Windows 10 Mobile before reaching the deadline.
Along with this drastic update, WhatsApp also unwrapped WhatsApp Beta app versions numbers 2.17.424, 2.17.436 & 2.17.437 for Android, iOS, and Windows Mobile with that they also updated their Whatsapp for Business app. Features like recall wrongly sent messages, tap to unblock any user, UPI payment support, revise admin setting, shake to report and many other were also added.