It was supposed to end sooner, and it looks like WhatsApp is finally ending its support for legacy smartphones as we enter 2018. If you’re using a BlackBerry or Windows Phone from 3-5 years ago, your time is finally up in the next couple of days.
WhatsApp will no longer be supported on BlackBerry OS, BlackBerry 10 and Windows Phone 8.0 (and older) beginning 1 January 2018. If you’re on a Nokia S40 device, WhatsApp surprisingly is still supporting them until 31 December 2018.
However, this doesn’t mean that messaging app will stop working altogether on New Year’s day. Since WhatsApp will no longer provide active development for these platforms, some functionalities may cease to work at any time. This also means that you won’t be able to create or reactivate existing WhatsApp accounts on these old devices.
According to WhatsApp, these legacy platforms do not offer the capability for WhatsApp to expand its features in the future. They highly recommend that you switch to a newer smartphone or a newer platform such as Android 4.0+, iOS 7+ or Windows Phone 8.1+ to continue using WhatsApp.
For those migrating from one different platform to another, WhatsApp does not offer any migration tools (e.g. Android to iOS, or BlackBerry OS to Android) but they do provide the option to email your chat history as an attachment.
