Beginning January 1, 2021, Whatsapp will no longer support older devices. This may mean that certain features on the app will no longer be accessible or the entire app itself may no longer work.
This will only apply to devices that are running anything less than iOS 9 or Android 4.0.3. A general rule of thumb of devices running on these operating systems are your grandmother’s iPhone 4 or your grandfather’s Samsung Galaxy S2.
If you have an older device, you can attempt to upgrade the software to higher than iOS 9 or Android 4.0.3. However, older phones may not have the appropriate hardware to run the newer software at all and would fail to upgrade.
(Credit: Freepik)
Still, the phones that will be impacted will be nearly a decade old, and in tech-terms that’s essentially a fossil. Even if the fossil using fossil phones insists that “it still works”, phones are not toaster ovens where you can use the same one for a generation.
Since phones are now a necessity, at the very least a minor upgrade is probably in order. You can get a new no-frills budget phone for just a couple of hundred ringgit (or for free with certain telco plans) or you can go all-out and grab the latest iPhone 12.
Again, support for older phones ends on 1 Jan 2021, so if you can’t reach your elderly grandparents to wish them Happy New Year, this may be why.
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