WhatsApp dumps support to BlackBerry OS, older phone models

“While these mobile devices have been an important part of our story, they don’t offer the kind of capabilities we need to expand our app’s features in the future.”, say WhatsApp.

The company further stated – As we look ahead to our next seven years, we want to focus our efforts on the mobile platforms the vast majority of people use.

WhatsApp is seven years old and it’s becoming more popular with each passing day.

Even though the decision to end support for these nearly dead operating systems makes sense, it’s surprising that WhatsApp will not be supporting BlackBerry platform starting next year.

Today, Google’s, Apple’s and Microsoft’s mobile operating system account for 99.5 percent of sales, but back in 2009 they only held a meager 25 percent.

WhatsApp last week silently pushed a server-side update to its app on Android and iOS that increases the number of users included in a group chat.

While it might be hard for some users of older operating systems to accept, WhatsApp’s choice here is probably the right way to go. In fact, earlier this month, the company announced in a recent blog post that “one billion people are using WhatsApp”. Until now, WhatsApp asked some users to pay an annual fee for using the app after the first year of use – though as many of us experienced, most users were not asked to pay after a year, and instead were given extensions each year.

We’ve all been wondering how is that WhatsApp Messenger is still working on platforms like Android 2.1 or Symbian S60, and how long it will take the developer of the application to stop supporting them. The company has said that it was a tough decision, and they requested these users to upgrade to a newer version of their OS in order to continue using the services of the app.