By the end of the year, it will cease support for a handful of mobile operating systems, including BlackBerry, Nokia S40, Nokia Symbian S60, Android 2.1 and 2.2, and Window Phone 7.1.
WhatsApp’s reasoning is that since its debut in early 2009, the mobile landscape has greatly changed. At the time, about 70 percent of smartphones ran on operating systems from BlackBerry and Nokia, which those from Google, Apple and Microsoft only made up 25 percent. Today, the latter three account for 99.5 percent of sales, says the company.
It will still run perfectly on the blackberry 10 for guys who don’t want to upgrade, just means there wont be any updates/feature improvement. Blackberry being on the list should not be a surprise because even BlackBerry has ditched their old os series , the new BlackBerry priv is running on android
RIM is caught in between a rock and a hard place, from a tech perspective it did not make sense to retire their blackberry 10 OS, but from a commercial side it made a lot of sense. this is why it had to be done, even though blackberry 10 is as solid os as they come, rock solid in fact, they were loosing out on the main market because there are very few developers for the BB OS leading to very few value addition apps which would have pulled in the younger masses. on the other hand, every wannabe developer can write an android app hence why it became so popular. so to make more sales and target a bigger audience , they had no option but to move to android, if you noticed since os 10.2 they started adding some limited support for android but still could not compete with the native android platforms.
same curcimstances that killed Symbian OS came back to hound blackberry os
Yeah, well I am a developer for BB10. The only definite decision is that there is not going to be a version based on Qt5 (lots of core differences between Qt4 and Qt5).
For the foreseeable future, security and feature updates are planned, and a major update 10.4 is already in alpha testing.
And poor decision making. They should have made the link between BB10 and Android more public. Very few people know that you can load apks on BB10. If they had given full support to the Android play store, it would be a different story all together.
Its actually more complex than poor decision making, to the core guys, that (the terms) would have been like ceding control of their baby, and FYI they actually tried it out a working relationship but it did not favor RIM, remember the first thing before even adding the android support on 10.2 was releasing a BBM version that allowed android guys to BBM, why do you think that did not work out well. BTW in previous post when i said “a couple of guys in the tech team are my peers”, i meant i knew them on first name basis.
There are some very interesting intrigues going on there (between RIM and Google), similar to what happened to keyhole (remember the guys google bought google earth from? reason why they are called kml files - keyhole markup language)
BB10 has had android support since the start. Remember, the OS is based on Qt for android. What happened in 10.2 is that we enabled the ability to install apks straight from the phone UI. But since the inception of the project it was possible to sideload apks using bblink or even using chrome. I remember I got my first test Q10 and Z10 units in Feb 2013 and I could install Android apps on the device.
Thats correct, you could load very simple apps, problem came in when you needed to work some more complex apps, e.g apps that required to consume google maps, you had to side load google account manager, google id and google play store, i remember going through the process several years back and it was like pulling teeth. not a process for every tom dick and harry, and it was causing major battery issues for the Z10, the Z30 fixed alot of the power issues but still the process was too complex hence why it made more business sense to go native android
my BB curve shall remain in mg archive as a testimony to human ingenuity and engineering. it will always remind me and future generations of how great oud generation is
I had an Ideos sometime early 2015 and it had already refused to install WhatsApp. Even though I had used the older versions of WhatsApp on it some years back.