A recent update on WhatsApp’s FAQ page showed that the company is stopping their support for millions of smartphones.
The phones affected by this change, however, will only be those that still use older versions of iOS or Android. The version specified by the Facebook-owned company are iOS 8 and Android 2.3.7 (Gingerbread).
The official end date for the support for these versions will be on 1st February 2020. This means that WhatsApp users that fail to update their phone’s system version might have their services cut after the specified date.
Seeing that the iOS 8 was released 5 years ago in 2014 and Android Gingerbread was introduced almost a decade ago in 2010, it’s easy to assume that no one will be affected by WhatsApp’s cease of support. However, knowing that the messaging app is used by over a billion people worldwide, some people might not have the financial power to make that change.
Here are some prominent phones that WhatsApp will cease their support on:
1. iPhone 4
- Release Date: June 2010
2. Google Nexus One
- Release Date: January 2010
3. Samsung Galaxy S
- Release Date: June 2010
4. Samsung Google Nexus S
- Release Date: December 2010
5. Lumia 650
- Release Date: February 2016
It should be noted that all windows phones will also cease to receive support for their WhatsApp app. To put it simply: no matter how new your windows phone is, the messaging app will no longer support it. While iPhones is pretty straight forward with which phone will no be receiving support, Android and its open source is a bit tricky.
However, you can easily check out whether your vintage piece is supported or not via the link here.
