WhatsApp ends supporting Blackberry OS
WhatsApp not only ends support for Blackberry OS but many others
WhatsApp, owned by Facebook has declared its end of support for a few operating systems. These operating systems include Blackberry, Nokia Symbian S60, and Windows Phone 7.1. The company says it will impact only a handful of smartphone users. It estimates there are very few smartphone users who are having devices working on these operating systems. Facebook says it wants to move ahead with a focused approach in further development of this most popular messaging and voice application’s features. It probably is working on 80/20 rule in my opinion. By discarding 20% of the smartphone users with least used operating system will let them focus more on 80% of users. More than a billion smartphone owners actively use this app. The divorce will happen in December 2016
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The good news is that the app will be running fine on Blackberry latest range of smartphones. It is so because the new range from Blackberry runs Android operating system. Logically, the end of support will not impact even the 20% as stated above. That was just to elaborate my opinion using 80/20 rule. It will not impact much because these are least used operating systems. They don’t come on new devices. These are legacy operating support facing an end of life. Even there are no updates released for these operating systems. The only exception among these is Blackberry 10. It was launched hardly three years back and is still being supported and developed by the company.
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The next upgrade of Blackberry, that is, 10.3.4 is planned to be released in the last quarter this year. The development of Blackberry 10 has been a setback for the company as it has not attracted volume churning. It could attract hardly 1% of the market though the dreams were much higher. I assume an end of life of Blackberry 10 soon.
