By Chris Emejuru

Sometime last year news started going round that WhatsApp would stop working on Windows Phone devices on December 31, 2019. The blame was shifted to Microsoft for its ending of support for the platform. At that time I found that lame excuse hard to digest. Reason being that you don’t just abandon your existing customers to the extent of stopping your product from functioning in a bid to force them to move over to another version of the product. Any and every good commercial software developer must understand the idea of backward compatibility in building features into their software. When a new version of Windows comes out, it still manages to retain features for the benefit of older users. MSDOS of the 1980s and ’90s is supposed to be dead but look closer and you’d see that its commands and concepts like copy, cd and batch files are still alive in what present-day Windows calls its command box. And even when Microsoft stops supporting a version of Windows, it’s not done in a way that would make that version completely useless wherever installed. Otherwise Windows would not have grown to be the most popular operating system today.

Anyhow, as December 31 approached I tried to find out exactly what would happen. The “stop working” stories were all over the web, but there was one that I read where they said WhatsApp would still continue to work but would no longer be updated and some features could stop working at any time. That sounded more like it, but I went on to save all my WhatsApp chats to email on that December 31. Come January 1, though, the story changed. The date shifted to January 14. I had to wonder why and again Microsoft was said to have postponed its own support termination from December 31 to January 14.

I more or less convinced myself that WhatsApp would not really stop working on January 14, only they would stop updating the app. January 14 came and they changed the story to “stop working after January 14” but I no longer took note and I didn’t save any new chats since December 31. Then came the morning of January 15.

Microsoft was more polite. When I turned on my Windows 7 laptop, a modern version of their famous “Blue Screen” came up, warning me that they have stopped supporting Windows 7 for this and that reason and advising I move over to another PC running Windows 10. They even allowed me to choose not to be reminded again.

Then I wanted to check something on WhatsApp in my Windows Phone device and got a slap in the face! This is what the app presented me with, that black screen above, with a different time.

So it still worked, only that now, it was just displaying a notice rather than doing what it was installed for. They expected me to move over to another device by force. But why would Facebook Inc that acquired WhatsApp go to this length to force certain users of WhatsApp to change their phones? Were they paid so much by some phone companies to do this, so those companies could use WhatsApp compatibility as a marketing gimmick? Windows 7 that Microsoft was dropping support for still worked fine, and so did millions of older Windows XP installations around the world. The indirect or hidden cost of using a supposedly-free product like WhatsApp was finally staring us in the face.

My immediate challenge at that moment was the recent chats I made since December 31, especially with business contacts. Were they gone for good? Or could I still get to them somehow? For the next few minutes I did battle with WhatsApp on this, and came out victorious, proof that everything in the app was still there, only they’d programmed the app not to reveal them on checking and finding a certain date. Since the “stop working” feature was date-based, I first changed the date in the device to January 14, after suspending automatic date setting.

When I did that, WhatsApp started with the message contact list, no not-supported screen, but on attempt to open the message list for a contact it would say the phone’s date/time was incorrect and refuse to go further. I finally turned off location access for the device along with automatic date setting, set the time zone to Alaska (UTC-9) that was still a day behind our time zone then, restarted the phone, set the date to January 14. This tricked WhatsApp into starting normally and I was then able to access the contact message lists which I offloaded to email.

Now today as I write this, is January 18. Windows 7 that Microsoft was supposed to have stopped supporting on January 14 is still downloading and installing updates on my laptop, as you can see here.

And WhatsApp is still showing its black screen on the Windows Phone device. If I change the date in the phone to January 14, that screen would go off and the normal message contact list (as at January 14) would show, but only for a few seconds. I have another phone that I can run WhatsApp on, but I am not in a hurry to move over, especially as I first have to cut my SIM. Facebook Inc has to understand what they did to WhatsApp on Windows Phone is not right. If a version of web-based Facebook still works on this Windows Phone device of mine (at least on Opera Mini), why not a similar version of WhatsApp? Or maybe it’s their way of forcing people like me to use the messaging on their web-based Facebook instead? I may just settle for Skype or Telegram if only I can get them to install on my Windows Phone device. Or maybe use them only on a laptop.

The WhatsApp icon tile is still there on the home page of my Windows Phone device. It did not uninstall itself on January 14, and it still does something when tapped. Only, not what it used to do.