Early next year, popular messaging service WhatsApp will stop working on millions of smartphones that are still active to date.

According to the platform, iPhones running on iOS 8, which includes a total of 1.4 million devices still active in 2019 dating back to the iPhone 5 and older will cease having access to WhatsApp as of February 1 2020. The same applies to Android devices running on Android 2.3 Gingerbread, which translates to a total of 7.5 million phones as of May 2019.

At the moment, users of phones running on these platforms are unable to create new WhatsApp accounts or verify existing accounts.

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Windows Phone Support

While iPhone and Android users may have a reprieve until February next year, Windows Phone users are not so lucky. WhatsApp also plans to end support for all Windows Phone devices on December 31 2019.

This coincides with Microsoft’s plans to also end support for the platform altogether. This means that any of you still using a Windows Phone device, it’s really time to upgrade to something else.

According to the Facebook-owned messaging platform, the reason they are killing support for these legacy operating systems is that the platforms do not offer support for the kind of features WhatsApp plans to implement.

“This was a tough decision for us to make, but the right one in order to give people better ways to keep in touch with friends, family, and loved ones using WhatsApp,” said WhatsApp in a blog post shared earlier on.