Citing reasons of expansion, WhatsApp messenger is severing ties with BlackBerry and Nokia. The free-messaging platform, that celebrated its seventh birthday earlier this week, boasts of one billion people users around the world. The company believes that despite all the progress it has made in the last seven years, its mission has never changed. The idea is to ensure everyone could stay in touch with their family and friends, without costs or gimmicks standing in the way.
Back in 2009, when WhatsApp was launched, 70 percent of the smartphones used BlackBerry and Nokia’s operating systems. The other operating systems were lesser than 25 percent of mobile devices. However now BlackBerry owns less than 1 percent of the market and the operating systems offered by Google, Apple and Microsoft account for 99.5 percent of sales today.
And as the company looks ahead to its next seven growth years, it has decided to focus efforts on the mobile platforms that the vast majority of people use. By the end of 2016, WhatsApp Messenger will end the support on BlackBerry, Nokia S40, Nokia Symbian S60 Android 2.1 and Android 2.2 and Windows Phone 7.1.
Confirming this, a WhatsApp blog stated, “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.”
