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Why would an application which has features added all the time work on an old, unsupported, underpowered devices?

Whatsapp and Telegram dropped support for Android 4.4 devices, are they emplying planned obsolescence?

Well WhatsApp and Telegram are free, so it's hard to make that argument there, but my understanding was that the problematic behaviour was for Apple to make the performance of those devices otherwise worse without disclosing the reasons why, which caused people to upgrade earlier than they otherwise would have.

The analogy would be for WhatsApp to make it take artificially longer to send messages on Android 4.4, which I think people would have a problem with but they have no good reason to that.

I can't speak for Telegram, but in the case of WhatsApp, they decide to deprecate particular SDK versions when the usage of those SDK versions drops below a threshold, and it's against their interests to do otherwise, because they lose market share and they are making a tradeoff between engineering support costs and users.

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