Roger Fingas
Support for Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Contacts will be discontinued for some older Apple devices as of June 15, Yahoo said in a Thursday blog post.
In the case of Yahoo Mail, people with devices running iOS 4 or earlier will no longer be able to use their Yahoo accounts with iOS' native Mail app. At the same time, Yahoo Contacts will stop syncing with Macs on OS X Lion or earlier.
The changes are needed to ensure the speed, security, and functionality of Yahoo services, the company explained. People with unsupported operating systems will still be able to reach Mail and Contacts on the Web via mail.yahoo.com.
Yahoo also said it is planning to shut down a number of other properties entirely, most notably maps.yahoo.com, which is closing at the end of June. Maps will continue to be a part of Yahoo offerings, but only in relation to services like Flickr and search.
Also shuttering by the end of the month is Yahoo TV in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Canada, and the UK, along with Yahoo Autos in those same countries except for Canada. By mid-month Yahoo Movies will disappear in Spain, and much of Yahoo Philippines will be gone, redirecting Web visitors to Yahoo Singapore. Even Singapore will lose Yahoo Entertainment come early July.
Pipes, the company's Web aggregation tool, will no longer allow new Pipe creation after August 30. The service will come to an end a month later in order to let developers migrate any essential data.
Charles Martin
Malcolm Owen
Andrew O'Hara
William Gallagher
10 Comments
The discontinuation of service on iOS 4 or older I think is reasonable, but OS X Lion? I still know lots of researchers using it, and unfortunately they cling to that service, and won't be happy at this.
I imagine if you're willing to pay for Yahoo Mail, you could set up access via POP (assuming you still need a paid account for that). I don't use free webmail services, but I have hotmail set up for my child and he's using my iPhone 3G which is stuck on 4.2.1. Wonder if Microsoft will kill support for older devices too soon.
In what way did Yahoo ever support email on Macs? I've never used anything but the web interface to check my yahoo mail. Is that going away? And I'm an OS 10.6 user, with no desire to upgrade. If yahoo demands it, they'll find themselves dropped.
this is good news. it will force users to upgrade their ancient iOS devices. OS X Mavericks is the future and it's time for people to upgrade; it's free so it shouldn't be too big of a deal. I'd be happier if they charged for the Mavericks upgrade because they put a lot of work into the update and you're getting a lot more utility but I'm hoping this is just a play to slow people's macs and get them to buy new hardware.
Those are the lucky folks as yahoo is constantly hacked, almost every email from yahoo accounts to me is someone's email that's been compromised