WhatsApp is expanding its grip to very smartphone and mobile operating system. Today the company has announced on its blog that its popular messaging app is a now available for Nokia feature phones like the Nokia 8110 also known as the banana phone.
These Nokia phones runon KaiOS, and Whatsapp can be downloaded from the KaiStore for KaiOS Nokia feature phones with 256MB or 512MB of RAM. The app will come preinstalled on select phones starting in the third quarter of this year. The KaiOS version of the app supports both calling and messaging, and it includes end-to-end encryption just like it does on Android and iOS.
WhatsApp has been gradually released for select KaiOS devices over the past year. Last September, the app came to JioPhone handsets, which run the OS and that it came to the Nokia 8110 back in April, but only in India. Today marks the first time it is available in a broader worldwide release.
The app is now available for a total of seven KaiOS devices; the Cat B35, Doro 7060, JioPhone (Reliance Jio), JioPhone 2 (Reliance Jio), MTN Smart, Nokia 8110 (HMD Global), and the Orange Sanza.
This side of the Sahara, phones like the Nokia 8110 are positioned as the kind of phone that you people by as either secondary devices or as their main phones due to affordability and the love for the Nokia brand. They are low-cost, offer simplicity, and most importantly offer a long battery life (the Nokia 8110 has 25 days of standby, for example) are much more essential. WhatsApp is a near-essential communications service, and now users won’t be cut out from it if they don’t own a smartphone.
KaiOS is a lightweight operating system that’s currently available on a small number of feature phones. The operating system actually started its life as a fork of Firefox OS after Firefox gave up on the idea of a phone OS.
