Xiaomi has apologized to its customers over the whole WhatsApp becoming obsolete debacle, accepting full responsibility for the incident. The chat app displayed an unusual message to scores of users in India on January 13, telling them that their version of the application had become out of date and they needed to update it immediately.
Problem was, no one could since the Play Store told them that they had the latest version of WhatsApp installed. Further adding to the confusion was a sentence at the end which asked people to leave the testing version of the app, even though most were not on the beta build.
As it turns out, they were unknowingly beta testers all along since Xiaomi had pushed them into becoming one accidentally. The brand says a beta version of WhatsApp had been rolled out from its Mi App Store which the affected consumers had updated to. This was the main culprit behind the mess, explaining why some people were hit and others were left unscathed.
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Xiaomi has now updated its Mi App Store listing to a stable version which has been approved by WhatsApp. It’s asking its customers to upgrade to that build to resolve the issue. Alternatively, they can head directly to the app’s site and download the Android APK.
This way, users can get updates directly from WhatsApp instead of a third-party like Xiaomi. The latter is promising to be more vigilant going forward, but it’s better to be safe than sorry in case something like this happens again in the future.