From Today, WhatsApp Won't Work on These Android, iOS Phones: Is Your Phone Eligible?

WhatsApp is the world’s most popular messaging service, no questions asked. As a result of its popularity, it is used in numerous corners of the world, and on a large number of devices – over 1.5 billion active devices each month, to be precise. However, beginning today, WhatsApp will no longer work on certain Android and iOS smartphones, as announced by the Facebook-owned brand earlier. Going by reports, starting today, February 1, WhatsApp will no longer work on Android devices running on Android Ice Cream Sandwich (v4.0.3) and before, as well as Apple devices running on iOS versions older than iOS 9.

According to Facebook, this should not significantly impact active users on its platform, and will help the company streamline its platform and servers in terms of the support it extends to devices. As we had reported earlier, 99.6 percent of all Android devices should remain safe from the end of service update from WhatsApp. While such clear numbers are not available for iOS devices, it was noted that over 91 percent of all iOS devices already run iOS 12 or newer operating systems, which suggests that only a very small portion of iOS users still use devices that won’t make the cut.

However, Google’s fragmented Android ecosystem does mean that there still might be some users of older Android devices, back from when Android updates were less frequent and ubiquitous, who might be running the outdated operating systems. In general, it is deemed to be good practice to use devices that are regularly updated, in order to steer clear of cyber threats. As a result, users of old Android and iOS devices that are still eligible to run WhatsApp are nevertheless urged to upgrade their devices, in order to receive Google’s security updates and continue using WhatsApp as well.