WhatsApp is one of those few apps that are available on most platforms. Its cross platform availability is its best feature and that is not ending soon.
We live in an era where we generally have two main platforms for phones: Android and iOS. Feature phones have been relegated but they are still big business in many parts of the world.
One of the upcoming major feature phone operating systems is KaiOS and they are finally getting WhatsApp.
KaiOS Technologies announced that they have made WhatsApp available for download from the KaiStore. This is limited to devices that have either 256MB or 512MB of RAM that run KaiOS.
KaiOS predicts by Q3 2019, what they call ‘smart’ feature phones running KaiOS will have WhatsApp preinstalled upon shipment. This follows the move they did earlier by pre-installing Facebook on KaiOS phones in India, AFrica, Europe and the Asia Pacific region.
WhatsApp is one of the biggest messaging platforms we have right now with 1.5 billion users. But interesting enough, the number of ‘unplugged’ people in the globe is more than the ones who use the Internet regularly. This move will make sure that these kinds of populations will be able to communicate via WhatsApp.
Currently, KaiOS is on 100 million devices worldwide. There are a number of devices that run KaiOS like the famous “Jio” phone in India and HMD’s Nokia 8110 4G. In India, KaiOS is second place after Android and it is partly thanks to that Jio Phone. WhatsApp will now join the likes of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube in the Kai Store.
