Facebook Inc.’s End WhatsApp Support for Various Smartphones

The social media network’s most popular acquisition is limit its access for a number of Blackberry and Nokia users,

Facebook Inc. has always managed to keep its users interested by adding exciting new features to its all platforms which encourage them to upgrade their applications and get the latest versions. Presently, the social media giant has adopted a new strategy to attract more users to use its instant messaging service, WhatsApp. As per the new strategy, the social media will be ending support for a few of the old and outdated operating systems of Blackberry Ltd and Nokia by the end of 2016.

The instant online messaging service, WhatsApp was launched back 2009 and has been ever since its inception however after Facebook Inc. acquired it back in 2014, its popularity doubled in numbers of users. It was one expensive application that the networking website acquired for over $22 billion but it is safe to say that it was worth every penny spend by the technology giant.

Ever since the messaging app was acquired by the social media website, it has gone through a number of updates and versions which includes having new emojis, better security and other such new features. According to recent news, the app will have video calling service soon too; it has over one billion monthly active users. The company wants all its users to have upgraded technology hence it has opted for this strategy. The software that will not support WhatsApp anymore is Blackberry operating system, Windows Phone 7.1, Symbian S60, Android 2.1 and Android 2.2.

One of the main reasons for this new update is that the company wants to provide more security to its customers on the specific platform and since these operating systems do not support that kind of security it has decided to end support for them. In a blog post the company stated that these devices have played an important part for the organization but they are not capacity to deal with the kind of features that it wants to add to these platforms.

Initially when Facebook was new, the smartphone market was owned by Blackberry and Nokia smartphone, they owned over 70% of the market share but according to a recent search by Gartner, the once dominant players, BBRY now comprises of less than 1% market while Nokia is way behind it. However it could prove to be a plus sign for the Canada based smartphone maker as more people will be encouraged to buy the its latest Priv since it is powered by the android operating system.

Point to be noted here is that many would believe that the user count of the users of WhatsApp will decrease but the difference will be a very small number of people as many now use alternate platforms.