WhatsApp is about to make one of its periodic crackdowns on compatibility: the company has announced that in a few days, on October 24 to be precise, it will no longer work with devices equipped with a version lower than Android 5.0. The minimum requirements of the platform acquired years ago by Meta are therefore Android 5 (“Lollipop”), iOS 12 and KaiOS 2.5.0.
Android 5 Lollipop was unveiled by Google in 2014 along with a pair (which turned out to be decidedly unfortunate, in hindsight) of Nexus devices: the Nexus 6 smartphone developed by Motorola (which Google had acquired very recently) and the Nexus 9 tablet created by HTC. It was a significant step forward from a design point of view: it definitively abandoned Holo of the 4.x era and introduced for the first time Material Design, which we still use today albeit in a much more evolved form. There were several devices that stopped at KitKat, the latest version of Android 4.x.
Clearly, we are talking about devices that have now almost disappeared from the market, probably released even 10 or 11 years ago. WhatsApp doesn’t explain precise technical reasons, but notes that “To decide when to stop support, like all other companies in the tech industry, every year we look at which devices and software are older and have the fewest users. These devices may not have the latest security updates, or they may not have the required features to run WhatsApp.”
In any case, WhatsApp confirms that affected users will receive a notification on their device in time.
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