WhatsApp risking market position by withdrawing from BlackBerry and Nokia?

By the end of this year, messaging application Whatsapp will end its support to phones powered by Nokia and Blackberry. Currently, the Facebook owned company boasts of over a billion users worldwide and a major chunk of these users emerge from Indian markets.

In a blogpost, Whatsapp shared, “When we started WhatsApp in 2009, people’s use of mobile devices looked very different from today. The Apple App Store was only a few months old. About 70 per cent of smartphones sold at the time had operating systems offered by BlackBerry and Nokia.”

It also claimed that mobile operating systems offered by Apple, Google and Microsoft which account for 99.5% of current sales, were below 25% of mobile devices sold at that time.

The blog post further said, “As we look ahead to our next seven years, we want to focus our efforts on the mobile platforms the vast majority of people use. So, by the end of 2016, we will be ending support for WhatsApp Messenger on BlackBerry (including BlackBerry 10), Nokia S40, Nokia Symbian S60, Android 2.1, Android 2.2 and Windows Phone 7.1,”

Whatsapp claims that though it was a tough decision, it is the right one so as to allow people a better way to stay in touch. The social media giant, Facebook acquired Whatsapp in February 2014 for a whooping 19 billion, its biggest buy till date.

WhatsApp shutting gates for BlackBerry could imply new for BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), which used to be a huge craze but, eventually lost popularity with WhatsApp's growing dominance.

Currently, WhatsApp witnesses around 42 billion messages, 1.6 billion photos and 250 million videos shared daily and over a billion groups. Statistics further highlighted that WhatsApp occupied 56 per cent of the mobile messenger market in India, leading over Line and homegrown WeChat.