WhatsApp will not support older Android devices starting 1st November

Some Android users are about to lose their WhatsApp service. Beginning next month, WhatsApp will stop supporting Android 4.0.4 and older.

WhatsApp users with older Android phones may soon find themselves cut off from service. Starting November 1, WhatsApp will pull support on Android phones running Android 4.0.4 or older. The new official standard is Android 4.1 (Jellybean) or newer. The move follows the company dropping support for iOS 9 back in March.

Discontinuing support on older operating systems is nothing new. WhatsApp and many other companies update system requirements about once a year. The reason is that these aging operating systems no longer get regular security updates. The last update for Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) was in June 2012, with Google officially discontinuing it in 2018. It only represents a very small section of Android users (0.2 percent as of July 2020).

Even still, Android 4.1's final update was in October 2013, and Google ended support last July. So WhatsApp continues to run on Android versions as old as eight years. For iOS, WhatsApp is a bit more stringent, supporting nothing older than iOS 10, which was last patched two years ago.

Affected devices range from Samsung to Huawei. The easiest way to tell if the change will affect your phone is to look in the settings to see which version of Android it uses. If it is version 4.0.4 or older and has no option to update, that device is unsupported.

News Source: TechSpot