Facebook-owned mobile Messaging App WhatsApp has extended Android Gingerbread support until February 1, 2020. It means the app will stop working on devices that run Android Gingerbread and older platforms from February 1, 2020. So if you are using the mobile phone running on this platform, you will not be able to use WhatsApp after the year 2020.
After the halt of the support, users on Gingerbread platforms will not be able to create new accounts, nor re-verify existing accounts once the company ends support. If you are one of those who uses this operating system, we advise you to upgrade to a newer OS version before the support ends.
Whatsapp has already become unavailable on Nokia phones running Symbian S60, from June 30, 2017, BlackBerry OS and BlackBerry 10 and Windows Phone 8.0 and older from December 31, 2017.
“Because we will no longer actively develop for these platforms, some features may stop functioning at any time,” the company said its official blog post.
Android 2.3 Gingerbread was launched in the year 2010 and exactly 10 years later, it will end the support. However, the actual percentage of devices affected would be really low as Gingerbread still runs on 0.3 percent of all Android devices, as per Android OS distribution numbers. The app will still work on Android 2.3.7 and older versions of Gingerbread until February 1, 2020.
WhatsApp has already confirmed before that it will end support for Nokia S40 platform on December 31 later this year. After Gingerbread, since a now only a few users use Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, it is expected that the messaging app will also soon end its support too. WhatsApp has also already stopped support for Android Eclair and Froyo back in 2016.
WhatsApp will also stop its support for iOS 7 starting February 2, 2020. As per Apple, only five percent of iOS devices run iOS 9 and older.