Abandoned! WhatsApp to drop support for older Android, iOS and Windows Phone devices

If you have been loyal to your old device and are a heavy Whatsapp user, this might make you upgrade. Whatsapp will stop support for older Android, iOS and Windows Phone devices starting next year i.e. 2017. However, the actual percentage of devices affected would be really low. This follows the company's announcement earlier this year. Now, as the year end approaches, the company has finally revealed the devices which will not be getting the support starting 2017.

"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," said a spokesperson of WhatsApp in a blog post. It may be noted that during the year, a lot of new features, prominent among them being video calling, and a 'view as you download video' have been added to Whatsapp.

For Android users, devices running on Android 2.1 (Eclair) and Android 2.2 (Froyo) or below will not be served by Whatsapp. To put this in figures, based on Google's recent dashboard statistics, only 0.1 percent of Android devices will be affected by this move. In other words, you are good to go if you are on Ice Cream Sandwich or any version above that. Honeycomb being a tablet only version, is not included here. However, it will still be supported by WhatsApp.

Coming to the iOS, any Apple device running iOS 6 or below will not be supported by WhatsApp. Further, according to Apple's October 2016 data, about 8 percent of devices run on iOS 9 or below so the percentage of devices running on iOS 6 will be significantly lower than this figure. Also, if you are still on iPhone 3GS or running an old version on iPhone 4, 4S and 5, we recommend you to upgrade as well.

If you are still running a Windows 7 Phone, then you should know that the famous messaging app will drop the support starting next year. It's not really a surprise for this one as Microsoft itself dropped the support for Windows Phone 7 OS back in 2014.

Surprisingly, Blackberry 10, BlackBerry OS, Nokia S40 and Symbian S60 all will be supported till June 2017. Previously, there were rumors that the Facebook-owned messenger app will discontinue the support at the same time as above devices but WhatsApp seems to have changed its mind.

Recent stats reveal that WhatsApp has over 1 billion users and recent additions like the video calling feature and two-step verification will only help add to the existing numbers. Even with better functionality and additional features, several other messaging app services has not been able to come even close to these numbers which is why it is important to upgrade if you are still running on any of the above OS versions on your devices.