WhatsApp to stop working on select Android phones in September

Due to hardware limitations, WhatsApp every year, ends support for older phones, as they won't be able to support new features.

With more than 3.3 billion active users, WhatsApp is the most popular messenger app on most platforms, including Android, iOS and Windows.

To keep the subscribers hooked to the application, WhatsApp regularly rolls out new features to improve the user experience. Some of the recent additions include an option to recharge mobile prepaid subscriptions, an Instagram-like username, an Artificial Intelligence-powered Writing tool, a dual account for iOS devices, and more.

However, due to hardware limitations on older phones, new features don't work. So, every year, WhatsApp ends support for select models with outdated operating systems.

This time, WhatsApp has announced to end support for Android devices with Android v5.0 or older versions. Starting from September 8, the messenger app will work normally on devices with Android 6.0 or newer versions.

As for iPhones are concerned, devices with iOS 15.1 and newer versions will support WhatsApp.

In a related development, WhatsApp is testing an AI summaries feature.

With the new multi-chat AI summaries feature, WhatsApp will offer crisp updates on who has messaged and a gist of the texts. This way, the user can know important details and, if it is urgent, respond with a call or text message.

This is a tricky feature, as the AI feature needs to get the context correct and not interlink separate messages and come up with a misleading summary. This has happened with Apple's group notification feature.

Meta is taking the right path of testing it and doing more rigorously to ensure the AI summaries get the context right.

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