Older smartphones get locked out of WhatsApp

This New Year, WhatsApp was not an option for many people to send greetings to their friends and family. To add to their woes, alternative messenger apps were also not easy to find.

WhatsApp stopped working on a range of older smartphones on the New Year’s Eve. The Facebook-owned messaging app no longer supports smartphones running Android 2.2 Froyo, or older versions of Android, iPhones running iOS 6 or older, as well as the handful of smartphones running Windows Phone 7 or earlier version.

Although these are quite old operating systems — Android 2.2, for instance, was released in 2010 — many people still use smartphones that cannot be upgraded to a newer version. And as a result of this, they have lost access to WhatsApp. Read more...