For some WhatsApp followers, Christmas may have been beneficial: if they have been offered a new smartphone, they will most likely be able to avoid being deprived of their favorite instant messenger. Indeed, the application will update on 1er January 2021, preventing its support by certain devices, details 01Net according to information from Techradar.com.
More specifically, the smartphones concerned are those, at Apple, with a version prior to iOS 9 or, for Android, an operating system older than version 4.0.3. This therefore concerns, for example, the iPhone 4 or the Galaxy S2, released in 2011, specifies the information site specializing in new technologies. Devices released later will still be able to run WhatsApp. For the moment.
A usual process
According to Techradar, some newer devices, but running on the versions of iOS or Android mentioned above, will be forced to downgrade to an older operating system. To do this, they will have to go to the internal settings of their phone.
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This scenario is not exceptional, and has occurred in the past, the last time in February 2020. Again, it was an update of WhatsApp. And after Numerama, which was based on data released by Google in May 2019, the proportion of Android users affected by this possibility was well below 1%.
