The world of smartphones looks very different to the one WhatsApp was born in seven years ago. Today BlackBerry has approximately 1% of the market, but in 2009 it was a world-leading smartphone vendor.

It made sense over the years for WhatsApp to support all the main mobile platforms in its efforts to be accessible to everyone.

Now the Facebook-owned company has decided that platform ubiquity is not worth the limitations that can bring to developing new features.

WhatsApp will be ending its support for all BlackBerry devices, even the most up-to-date models, at the end of 2016, the company says in a blog post.

It’ll also end support for Nokia S40, Nokia Symbian S60, Windows Phone 7.1 and older version of Android, 2.1 and 2.2.

The problem isn’t just that these platforms aren’t relevant to smartphone users anymore, but limited in what they can do with forthcoming features that WhatsApp has planned, it said.

"While these mobile devices have been an important part of our story, they don’t offer the kind of capabilities we need to expand our app’s features in the future,” the company said.

"This was a tough decision for us to make,” it added, "but the right one in order to give people better ways to keep in touch with friends, family, and loved ones using WhatsApp.”

Forbes