Whatsapp is installed on almost every smartphone in Germany. With the turn of the year, some will no longer support the service.

Chatting with friends, a quick video call to mum or a voice message for work colleagues: Whatsapp has become one of the most important means of communication in Germany and many other countries. An important reason: It runs on almost every smartphone. At the turn of the year, however, a line will be drawn for some of the devices.

Messenger announced this on its blog. On December 31, a whole range of older operating systems will no longer be supported. However, since many devices have not received any updates for a long time, this means in plain language: Whatsapp will no longer function fully on the almost 50 affected smartphones. A list of devices is below.

Whatsapp: no quick end

The company justifies the step with missing interfaces in the outdated operating systems of the affected devices. As a result, it would no longer be possible to ensure that all Messenger functions would still work correctly. Whatsapp now calls the Apple system iOS 12, Google’s Android version 4.1 and the systems KaiOS 2.5.0, which are particularly relevant in Asia, as well as Jiophone and Jiophone 2 as the minimum requirements.

The list of operating systems shows that the eviction is not as harsh as one might think. iOS 12 was released in 2018, Android 4.1 even in 2012. Most of the devices that are no longer supported are ten years old. The two iPhones now affected by the eviction, the iPhone 5 and the iPhone 5c, appeared as early as 2012 with the iOS 6 system and received software updates until 2016. The iPhone 5s, which is also nine years old, continues to work. Messenger Whatsapp is one of the apps with the longest support ever. Many other programs pull the plug much faster.

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Those:Whatsapp-Blog