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In the new year, WhatsApp will discontinue its services on devices operating on Nokia Series 40 (S40), and the app will be discontinued on iOS 7 or older versions and Android 2.3.7 on February 1, 2020.
This means that users with this phone will not be able to create new WhatsApp accounts. The old accounts will be functional but some of their features will stop working soon.
WhatsApp had announced a few years ago that it would stop services for these systems along with Nokia Symbian S60, Windows Phone 8.0, BlackBerry OS and BlackBerry 10.
The Facebook-owned messaging platform announced that it would stop investing to develop the app for these phones, in a blog post on December 30. "When we started WhatsApp in 2009, people's use of mobile devices looked very different from today. The Apple App Store was only a few months old. About 70 percent of smartphones sold at the time had operating systems offered by BlackBerry and Nokia.
"Mobile operating systems offered by Google, Apple and Microsoft — which account for 99.5 percent of sales today — were on less than 25 percent of mobile devices sold at the time," it read.
Nokia Series 40 had included Nokia 206, Nokia 208 and Nokia Asha devices including Nokia Asha 201, Nokia Asha 205, Nokia Asha 210, Nokia Asha 230, Nokia 301, Nokia 515, Nokia Asha 502, Nokia Asha 503, Nokia Asha 500 and Nokia Asha 501.
It was one of the most popular OS a few years ago. It was discontinued after Bill Gates' Microsoft took over the company.
WhatsApp is currently available on phone running on Android OS 4.0 and higher, iPhone OS 8 or higher, Windows Phone 8.1 or higher, JioPhone and JioPhone 2.
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