WhatsApp announced in May that it will end support for the Windows mobile operating system. The date was set to January 1st 2020 and despite speculations that the company may extend the date it is 2 days to go in this year and the Facebook company has yet to announce a new date hence it’s safe to assume they will follow through as planned.
It only makes sense that Facebook bow out as even Microsoft will draw the curtain on all things Windows mobile by 32st of this month.
“Because we will no longer actively develop for these platforms, some features may stop functioning at any time,” the company emphasized in a blog post.
It said: “You’ll no longer be able to use all Windows Phone operating systems after December 31, 2019, and WhatsApp might not be available in the Microsoft Store after July 1, 2019.”
The app will also stop working on older Android versions; gingerbread and the much older forio are along the affected API levels. The decision to cut off the much older versions is birth from a need to focus more resources scaling up rather spend so much time and resources on backward compatibility.
Affected users are hereby advised to take these simple steps to protect loss of data;
Open the chat you wish to export, and tap on Group Info. Scroll down and tap ‘Export Chat’. You’ll then be given the option to download the chat with or without media – note the attaching media will generate a larger chat archive.