Many of you may have forgot about Android Gingerbread by now given that it came out many years ago and Android itself has significantly changed over that period. Nevertheless, given the fragmented nature of Android, there are still devices out there that are still powered by this iteration of the OS and WhatsApp, the world’s most popular cross-platform messaging service, wants to make sure that they can continue using the service so it has promised to keep supporting Gingerbread until 2020.
WhatsApp has a good track record of supporting operating systems that others have long ditched. For example, it kept supporting Nokia Symbian S60 until June 30th, 2017. BlackBerry OS, BlackBerry 10, and Windows Phone 8.0 and older were supported until December 31st, 2017.
The Facebook-owned service has confirmed through its official blog that it will continue to support Android Gingerbread version 2.3.7 and older versions until February 1st, 2020. The first version of Gingerbread was released in 2010 so WhatsApp will essentially have supported this iteration of the OS for a decade.
Google’s latest Android numbers reveal that only 0.3 percent of devices out there are running Gingerbread but given that the platform powers over a billion devices, that’s still a considerable amount of users that WhatsApp wants to keep supporting for just a little bit longer.
Filed in . Read more about Apps, Gingerbread (Android) and Whatsapp. Source: blog.whatsapp