WhatsApp To End Support For BlackBerry, Nokia Operating Systems By 2017

WhatsApp announced Friday that services for BlackBerry and Nokia devices will be discontinued.

Earlier last week, the chat service celebrated its 7th anniversary along with its one billion users.

What took some of the users by surprise is the announcement that the company will be discontinuing its services for older operating systems.

This includes BlackBerry up to BlackBerry 10, Nokia S40, Nokia Symbian S60, Windows Phone 7.1 and Android 2.1 and 2.2.

The most notable part of the announcement is the inclusion of BlackBerry and Nokia's Symbian platforms.

The BlackBerry 10 operating system was first launched in 2013, and it has the same OS as the BlackBerry Leap which was only released April 2015.

BlackBerry has now moved on to the Android platform with its latest smartphone, the Priv.

As for Nokia, a lot of users will surely be affected, especially those in developing countries.

"When we started WhatsApp in 2009, people's use of mobile device looked very different from today," the company explained in a blog post.

"Mobile operating systems offered by Google, Apple and Microsoft - which account for 99.5 percent of sales today - were on less than 25 percent of mobile devices sold at the time," the post read.

The company stated that it wants to focus on the mobile platforms that the majority of its users are on.

To put it simply, these older platforms don't have the requirements that the company needs in order to improve and expand its service's features.

The company also hinted that it wants to improve the security features for the future versions of the app.

"This was a tough decision for us to make, but the right one in order to give people better ways to keep in touch with friends, family, and loved ones using WhatsApp," WhatsApp said in its blog post.

The Facebook-owned service has suggested to its users that they should upgrade to a more recent Android, iOS or Windows device.

For users who are still using devices on these older platforms, they will have until the end of 2016 before support for WhatsApp ends.