10 ms·

Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

436 points by DearAll 11mo ago

dangus 11mo ago
People use WhatsApp on the computer? From the Windows Store of all places? Must be a tiny percentage, which is why this version is now a basic web wrapper now. Anyway, I’d remind everyone that “using” RAM doesn’t mean “would not function with less RAM.” Many applications just use a lot if it’s available. RAM is not really something you explicitly ration.
- Bolwin 11mo ago
  I use it extensively. For years Whatsapp had a lovely native windows app and now they're replacing it with this horrible bloated thing
- Dylan16807 11mo ago
  > Anyway, I’d remind everyone that “using” RAM doesn’t mean “would not function with less RAM.” > Many applications just use a lot if it’s available. Some of that memory isn't going to be touched again, and will eventually be moved to swap, but it still pushed things out of RAM to be there and is a troublemaker. The rest of that memory will be needed again, so if it gets swapped out it'll lag badly when you switch back to the program. Either way 99% of programs are not doing any kind of intelligent use of spare memory. If you see them doing something that looks wasteful, that's because they're being wasteful. The one thing to remember is that at the OS level, disk cache pretty much qualifies as free memory. But that's unrelated to this issue.
- 1over137 11mo ago
  > RAM is not really something you explicitly ration. I guess this modern attitude is how we are where we are. RAM is absolutely a scarce precious resource that we optimize for. At least we used to, and some of us still do.
  - brabel 11mo ago
    I have 64GB of RAM and between IDE, some Docker containers and a local LLM, that started feeling like too little already. It’s just never enough, we always find creative ways to use every byte that’s available. Oh and the browser (any browser, I tried many) just takes up 1GB per tab it seems. It’s insane. My old 8GB laptop is nearly unusable now and can barely be used to browse the internet and very little else. I can at least keep coding on emacs. Who would think emacs would one day be an example of a lean app!?
  - dangus 11mo ago
    Define “scarce.” A pair of 16GB modules (32GB total) is around $100. You can buy an entire complete mini PC including 16GB of modular RAM for $240 on AliExpress. I’m not saying “don’t optimize.” I’m saying that watching your task manager, seeing a big number and freaking out isn’t really the definition of unacceptable performance.
- snthpy 11mo ago
  I also use it a lot but the app has always been terrible. I forget exactly what the problems are but I think the text input becomes unresponsive and it becomes unusable.
- tolciho 11mo ago
  > Anyway, I’d remind everyone that “using” RAM doesn’t mean “would not function with less RAM.” Except when something really does need more RAM, and fails. LLVM for example having, somehow, become a bit chonky and now fails to compile on 32-bit OpenBSD systems because it wants more memory than is available. Less bloated software of course does not suffer from this problem, and continues to run on still functional 32-bit systems. > Many applications just use a lot if it’s available. Xorg is using 92M, irssi 21M (bloated, but I've been lazy about finding something leaner), xenodm 12M. That's the top three. Oh, Windows? Yeah. About that. Best you can hope for is not to catch too much of the splatter. (What passes for Mac OS X these days also seems fairly dismal.) > RAM is not really something you explicitly ration. Paperclips were hung on the rack doors to make it easier to poke the wee little red reset button when some poorly written software went all gibblesquik (as poorly written software is wont to do) and the OOM killer could not cope and, whelp, reset time. Elsewhere, RAM is explicitly rationed—perhaps certain aspects of timesharing have been somewhat forgotten in this benighted era of bloat?—and malloc will return NULL, something certain programmers often fail to check for, which is generally followed by the kernel taking the error-ridden code out back and shooting it.
- eviks 11mo ago
  Before reminding everyone of a theory, did you check where that theory applies in this discussion of an app in practice? Also, even in theory the issue isn't only with "wouldn't function", but "would function slower due to eg disk swaps / cause other apps to function slower".
  - dangus 11mo ago
    Well, the author of the article sure didn’t check. They just opened the task manager and got mad.
    - eviks 11mo ago
      He did, via the task manager. You're the one saying high RAM utilization doesn't matter because 'wrong reasons in theory and in practice', so it's on you to check and confirm it so that you could be correct at least in practice in this specific case
      - dangus 11mo ago
        Okay, it’s on me. Send me to jail.
        eviks 11mo ago
        Oh, man, how can you be wrong about everything? Here is the author noticing performance issues, he's even in a "but in theory it doesn't have to be slow" camp that's closer to yours: > An app can use a lot of memory, and it does not necessarily mean it’s a performance nightmare, but the issue with the new WhatsApp is that it feels sluggish. You’re going to notice sluggish performance, long loading time, and other performance issues when browsing different conversations.
- vrighter 11mo ago
  "RAM is not really something you explicitly ration." It most certainly is. My old pc ran on 8MB of ram. Modern ones need 16GB for a comfortable experience. They do not do much more than I needed back then. I think it's reasonable to expect a simple chat app to not take up 128 times as much memory as my entire PC had when I was young.
  - miellaby 11mo ago
    2048 times
    - vrighter 10mo ago
      I was being generous and assuming the chat app "only" used 1GB of ram.
  - dangus 11mo ago
    I don’t think that’s a reasonable expectation at all. That’s like saying “oh well we landed on the moon with a turd burger of a computer so that means I shouldn’t need more than 8kb of memory!” Okay but I’m not trying to land on the moon, I’m trying to have an HD group video call and maybe play Cyberpunk in 4K later. Let me ask you, how much did that 8MB of RAM cost you back in the day? I bet it was more than the $100 it costs to get 32GB of RAM or the $200 it costs to get 64GB. Before you apply inflation!
    - vrighter 11mo ago
      it sent text messages, and received them. Ok now I can send some pictures and audio clips. I would understand a 10x increase, but not literal gigabytes. I have more memory so i can do more things, not so I can do the same things only slightly slower than I could before.
- miellaby 11mo ago
  The keyword you missed is 'idle'. An app should use as much Ram as needed to cache computation and network as it runs. But it shouldn't do when in the background. The Ram used here is not for accelerating the user experience. It's for the internal functioning of the managed language (Javascript) and virtual machine (Dom and browser API) because it has been packaged as a full Chrome clone running a single web app.
- mrweasel 11mo ago
  Honestly I think you're mostly correct. The amount of people using WhatsApp on the desktop is probably rather limited, certainly in the scope of WhatsApp usage in general. Memory, while I feel that a gigabyte is way to much for what is essentially a chat app, it is virtual memory, so it's not as problematic as I'd like it to be. The issue, I think, is who the desktop users are. They sales people, they are people who conduct business over WhatsApp. The buyers at a previous job uses whatever the sellers in Asia, eastern Europe and the middle east are using. A long time ago, that was mostly Skype, now it WhatsApp. There a huge benefit to having WhatsApp on your desktop, with easy copy/paste, Excel and everything you need to make the deals. Maybe Meta doesn't believe you should do business over WhatsApp and don't wont to cater to that crowed. I would love to see what a professional Windows application developer, if those are still around, could do with a native WhatsApp client. Using modern C++, or just C# and all the tooling provided by the platform, how small and functional could you actually make something like that.
  - dangus 11mo ago
    I agree about this potential of most WhatsApp users residing in markets with less powerful median hardware. Still, I think the experience reported is very similar to running Chrome, and I think any laptop with 8GB of RAM can handle the application plus Excel and a web browser (or just run WhatsApp in the browser) just fine. A complete mini PC with 16GB RAM, 512GB storage, and a relatively modern processor goes for like $240 on AliExpress. And that’s before you consider used hardware.
    - mrweasel 11mo ago
      It would be interesting in knowing how many feel like I do. Running an application in a browser window or tab is measure of last resort. People already have tens of tabs, if not hundreds, and multiple browser windows open, stuffing an application into one for those are terrible for the user experience. That's a worse solution than a web wrapper. It's much easier to locate an application that has it's own process and presence in the operating system.
      - 11mo ago
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
whatsupdog 11mo ago
For someone who travels a lot, I would love to have the ability to have WhatsApp on multiple phones (like telegram). I have a separate phone for traveling to US/Canada, which I usually wipe clean before crossing. It's really cumbersome to backup/restore Whatsapp messages from one phone to another. Or I just lose the messages that I send/receive while traveling.
- lxn 11mo ago
  You can install Whatsapp on up to four or five devices. There one main device, and the rest are "clients", exactly like the desktop apps. But they can send and receive messages even when the main device is offline.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - whatsupdog 11mo ago
    I was under the impression that they all must be on the same wifi.
    - tcfhgj 11mo ago
      this isn't the case anymore, now they are independent clients
- egl2020 11mo ago
  What do you put on the cleaned phone?
  - BoredPositron 11mo ago
    Entering/Leaving is the biggest problem with US travel and hardware. In the time inbetween you can just use it like a normal phone.
  - whatsupdog 11mo ago
    I have all my data and passwords etc., mostly on nextcloud at my home. After crossing the border I login into whatever accounts I need to and download whatever files I need. When it's time to cross again, I do a factory reset.
arunc 11mo ago
I don't mind as long as I can make calls from the app. The call feature isn't available on Linux/Web app unfortunately.
plotti 11mo ago
It's a piece of shit and they know they can get away with it. Omg why are there no open protocols on Instant messengIng like email. Europe should enforce it.
- bauruine 11mo ago
  You mean like Matrix or XMPP? They just aren't as ubiquitous as email unfortunately.
  - the_gipsy 11mo ago
    At least you can bridge WhatsApp and then use whatever client you like.
    - p0w3n3d 11mo ago
      how to?
      - p0w3n3d 11mo ago
        I mean I know that I can google it up but I'm looking for a working example. I found some code in github that is obsolete. Also whatsapp requires phone code and qr scan so looks like it's designed to prevent a server-only bridge.
        the_gipsy 11mo ago
        I got it running with NixOS https://github.com/benjajaja/nixos-rk3588/tree/main https://github.com/benjajaja/nixos-rk3588/tree/main WhatsApp does work, I use it on a daily basis. The bot/bridge makes it easy to log in with the QR code. You need to keep the phone app as you need to open it at least once a month or so. HMU if you need more info.
        p0w3n3d 10mo ago
        thanks!
Barrin92 11mo ago
I can understand (although I'd still think it's a bad idea) going with a web app wrapper if you're starting out that way, but what makes this decision truly baffling is that they already had a UWP app. Meta makes more money than god and there's over a billion WhatsApp users. It's not like this thing is Blender or a AAA game, it's a chat frontend. Maintaining it has to be a rounding error in the budget.
tonymet 11mo ago
Ms Edge offers webview2 which should share a single browser engine and profile (like your browser has tabs ) I wonder if they avoided that so they could use Electron and target MacOS / Linux too
- galad87 11mo ago
  The macOS app is the iOS app running on macOS thanks to Catalyst, hopefully they won't replace it with that Electron/WebViewOfTheDay crap.
- conradludgate 11mo ago
  TFA claims it is using WebView2
eviks 11mo ago
> WhatsApp is one of those Windows apps that went from being a web wrapper to a native app and then back to the web again after all these years of investment. We often hear stories about the speed of development and the issues of maintaining native apps, and then there are these rewrites every few years. Don't they waste more resources vs. creating / fixing the gaps in the native app? And this isn't somes quick startup prototype app that can flop and the effort would be wasted
- MrBuddyCasino 11mo ago
  How many chat apps did Google launch and kill? Its all about incentives: how to get that promotion. Maintaining a well working, established app isn’t going to get you anywhere.
- andy_ppp 11mo ago
  It’s probably a coup internally and some idiot who sucked up to the right people made a load of bad technical decisions. But at least they got promoted!
  - andy_ppp 11mo ago
    I’m pretending to myself this has largely got so many upvotes from the accused persons colleagues :-D
- phito 11mo ago
  From what I've seen web devs spend a huge portion of their time upgrading their dependencies, fighting with frameworks (they all curse react), or moving to the latest cool bundler.
- swiftcoder 11mo ago
  Nobody ever got promo for not rewriting the app
- qcnguy 11mo ago
  You're assuming the bugs/gaps can be fixed. The native frameworks on Windows suck so hard even Microsoft don't use them. If you build on them you're going to encounter lots of bugs and missing features that you can't easily work around, nor fix (they aren't open source), and which Chrome doesn't suffer from.
rock_artist 11mo ago
I use WhatsApp web and avoided the apps on desktop. Yet, I really don't understand why WhatsApp would need app especially with the state mentioned here (which is a basic wrapper) There are no calls in the web app, but modern web stack is more than enough to provide all the real functionality needed for it.
- happymellon 11mo ago
  Indeed, the desktop app provides absolutely nothing. If it allowed me to do video calls from a laptop, that could be useful but obviously that can't be a feature they therefore offer.
  - phonon 11mo ago
    > If it allowed me to do video calls from a laptop It does though? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3FkkHyvw8M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3FkkHyvw8M
    - rkomorn 11mo ago
      Yeah, calls are the only I installed the Windows desktop app instead of using WhatsApp Web.
    - happymellon 11mo ago
      Sorry I should have been clearer. According to this not any more.
  - mrweasel 11mo ago
    Apparently what it provided was a more lightweight experience at 1/10th the RAM consumption.
    - blitzar 11mo ago
      maybe they will provide a lite.whatsapp.com version (someone add it to the corporate vision board please)
deanCommie 11mo ago
What's missing from this history though is that when WhatsApp went from an Electron app to a native windows app it got decisively worse.
officerk 11mo ago
Shouldn't it be easier to maintain multiple versions of the same app because of the better productivity AI gives you?
- meindnoch 11mo ago
  You're absolutely right!
emsign 11mo ago
That must be part of their new AI strategy, tapping into their users potential.
jeisc 11mo ago
Their great AI coding agent could not keep the native app working?
- userbinator 11mo ago
  Unfortunately I don't think a vibe-coded native app would be that much better either.
  - InsideOutSanta 11mo ago
    True, but it's funny how C-level people at these companies mention the apparently ever-increasing percentage of their code that is written by LLMs every chance they get, but can't even maintain a relatively simple Windows application. Zuck, six months ago: “Within 12 to 18 months, most of the code will be written by AI. And I don’t mean autocomplete.” Meta, today: "Maintaining this basic Windows app is just too much work."
thunderbong 11mo ago
If most Windows users are using WhatsApp web on Microsoft Edge then making it an app like this saves them a huge chunk of effort in maintaining two apps (WhatsApp web and a separate Windows app)
userbinator 11mo ago
I remember doing voice and video calls, and of course IM, on a PC with 128MB of RAM and a single core CPU around the turn of the century. It's amazing how far we've regressed in efficency.
- retube 11mo ago
  I had a think pad with 32 mb of RAM and it did everything fine
  - dotancohen 11mo ago
    You weren't being tracked then, and targetted advertising was not as developed as it is today. Those features take client resources too to run.
- fmbb 11mo ago
  > It's amazing how far we've regressed in efficency. I don’t think we have. This is always what efficiency leads to, higher resource consumption. The phenomenon was described already in the 1800s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox JS and the web has seen performance improvements. They lead to more ads being served and more code being released faster to users.
  - specproc 11mo ago
    A reasonable comment, unfairly downvoted. That said, I do firmly agree with the parent: there is choice involved here, engineering decisions. The Microsoft world is particularly bloated, as they insist on shoehorning in unwanted anti-features into their OS. Much more efficient operating systems (and ways of building a chat client) exist. Jevon's paradox may describe a general tendency, but it's no excuse for awful software.
    - fmbb 11mo ago
      Oh it’s not an excuse for anything. It is just an observation about our economic system.
alex1138 11mo ago
Sometimes antitrust is a hard decision. Where do you draw the line, there are natural monopolies, etc so on so forth Whatsapp screams antitrust. If you look in the dictionary for antitrust, you see Whatsapp https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
squarefoot 11mo ago
Electron again? If they really can't develop a native interface, could they alt least consider Tauri?
- conradludgate 11mo ago
  It isn't electron. It's WebView2 which is also what tauri would be using on windows
  - squarefoot 11mo ago
    Thanks for the correction. Then wondering even more where all those wasted resources go.
ZeroConcerns 11mo ago
Well, the reason for the replacement seems pretty obvious: they're shipping new features on the web that aren't matched by the native client, and apparently that was just too hard to update for a multibillion AI-powered behemoth. So, a wrapper it is! You may not like that from a 'native look and feel' point of view, but the question 'what is a native Windows app these days anyway' is very much unanswerable, and you can actually implement stuff like this in a performant and offline-sensitive way. But, yeah, by the time the resulting GPU worker process balloons up to 400MB, that pretty much goes out of the window. I'm actually sort-of impressed, in that I have no idea how I would even make that happen! But that's why I don't work at a powerhouse like Meta, I guess...
- hliyan 11mo ago
  I've been wondering whether it's time to reserve browsers for their original purpose of reading documents and move web applications to a different paradigm: perhaps native controls/windows rendered and controlled by cross-platform markup served over the web, running on a "headless" sandbox. Perhaps a bit like React Native, but JIT compiled on the client. Not sure if this already exists. I'd really like to have native UI controls back for applications.
  - hoppp 11mo ago
    The majority of people use web browsers to run applications because every website nowadays is a huge blob of js. Maybe what you thinking is a wasm runtime like wasmer.
  - GoblinSlayer 11mo ago
    https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qmlreference.html https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qmlreference.html
    - hliyan 11mo ago
      Yes, but QT is precompiled. If QML can be served over the web and JIT compiled locally, that might be closer to what I'm talking about.
miohtama 11mo ago
You can use WhatsApp in your browser: web.whatsapp.com No 1 GB or installation needed Why is the desktop app even a thing?
- brabel 11mo ago
  The desktop app is very good for quickly attaching pictures and documents, or receiving them, I find it harder to do that on the phone app , and a web app just doesn’t work very well when you want it open all the time. Same with Slack, having a desktop app really improves things.
  - runiq 11mo ago
    > a web app just doesn’t work very well when you want it open all the time. Pin tab, problem solved?
    - omnifischer 11mo ago
      No. People are stupid. They love when taskbar (rightbottom) is flooded with icons and constantly blink to disturb when using device while sucking tons of CPU/memory. /s
    - Arainach 11mo ago
      Now you have to switch apps to the browser, find which browser window has the session you want, switch to the tab, etc., instead of just switching to WhatsApp app via keyboard or taskbar directly. The ergonomics are significantly worse. I want most of my browser windows full screen. I don't want my instant messenger full screen. Using it in a browser means I have to have one size, and resizing one changes the other. The experience of using a native app is far superior.
      - rkomorn 11mo ago
        I use the WhatsApp Web PWA and it allows me to have a dedicated window/app for it? Sure it's a little quirky at times (eg it closes if the browser restarts for update) and it doesn't have a system tray icon, but aside from that, it behaves like a separate app.
athanagor2 11mo ago
> You’d realise how bad this is when I tell you the benchmarks for the native WhatsApp for comparison. I tested the old/native WhatsApp, and it uses just 190MB most of the time, dropping to less than 100MB when it’s completely idle. At worst, it would reach 300MB, which can happen only when the chat is really active. Well sounds like a lot of useless work was being done then, how does it gobble 100MB when idle? Are the protocols that complex? Just do as I do and open web.whatsapp.com in your favorite browser
- galad87 11mo ago
  web.whatsapp.com is still going to use more RAM than the old native version.
- GoblinSlayer 11mo ago
  I think Zoom is like that too and uses some obscure chinese GUI library.
pjmlp 11mo ago
Just use the Web client instead. Another example of WinUI anemic state.
fx1994 11mo ago
Who even uses WA when there is blazing fast and feature pumped Telegram. ps. it even has a portable edition. Goat.
pta2002 11mo ago
I do want to point out, as someone who uses the WhatsApp app (to me, it’s slightly more convenient than the web version) that the old native windows app was /awful/. It looked native enough, but it just didn’t work. For as long as I remember it would randomly stop accepting input into the text field and I’d have to restart the app, and this was insanely frequent. Typing dead keys was also randomly broken with accents not coming through, which is really annoying if you’re trying to sound professional on a language that requires them. The new electron app does take more resources, but at the very least it works.
- dotancohen 11mo ago
  Have you tried telegram desktop to compare? I don't use whatsapp, but I have never had a performance problem with telegram desktop and I've been using it for years on underpowered machines. I usually run some variant of Debian on them.
  - wohoef 11mo ago
    Yeah I tried telegram. None of my contacts did though…
    - dotancohen 10mo ago
      Yeah, I'm sure that a lot of people notice the same thing then uninstall it. It's one of the solutions to the Fermi paradox, that both people have telegram installed at the same time.
- vitorgrs 11mo ago
  If is anything like the WhatsApp Web, "works" might be optimistic choice of word. When I switched from Windows, the thing that I missed from Windows on Linux was the native WhatsApp App. Now they killed there, so feeling better on my switch now!
  - naIak 11mo ago
    The WhatsApp web app is not perfect (no software is) but I’ve never had any major issues with it. It’s snappy and very rarely does it glitch out. I find your comment surprising.
kakacik 11mo ago
Ah yes the high quality engineering FB is famous for. Remember when their mobile app was snooping on users (probably microphone but who knows what else) some years ago so it was 'mysteriously' draining the battery when not used? Either unacceptable level of crap engineering consistently across quite a few updates from such a big wealthy company or... worse. I don't believe engineers there would be so bad consistently, so to me its pretty clear given overall behavior of company and its owner. I was very happy with that situation - it was the last and good enough reason to uninstall all FB-related apps from phone, and never looked back. That company (and not only that) is a cancer to whole society, as per design.
- alex1138 11mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
k_sze 11mo ago
Erm, so why wouldn’t I just use WhatsApp as a PWA? I wouldn’t even need to waste the disk space for yet another browser runtime.
- mdasen 11mo ago
  When you're using WebView2, it uses Windows' built-in browser runtime (Chromium/Edge). Electron ships a browser runtime, but the article notes they're using WebView2.
drivebyhooting 11mo ago
Off topic but I hate being forced to use Facebook properties like WhatsApp. I’m forced to be in parent group chats in this accursed ecosystem and give Zuck another DAU.
- tcfhgj 11mo ago
  Why are you forced to be in parent group chats?
  - blitzar 11mo ago
    Well ... when a mummy and a daddy love each other very much
    - herbst 11mo ago
      ... You'll end up being forced into WhatsApp groups? Sounds dangerous
      - johnisgood 11mo ago
        Yeah, why not something else? There are a lot of better alternatives. Matrix (Element) although does the search functionality work yet? It sucked ass. I wonder if it works now. Even Telegram is better, then there is Signal, Briar, and XMPP, too. They are fully featured ones. If you are fine with text only, then Ricochet Refresh is the best candidate as far as privacy goes.
        herbst 11mo ago
        Most parents I know dont even allow their children WhatsApp (as you said there are safer alternatives like Signal without weird social network functions you can barely control) so why would parents use it? For me this just sounds nonsensical. I am sure it makes sense somewhere in the world
        11mo ago
icar 11mo ago
I wish they used an SDK and published that, so we could build better clients.
paulmooreparks 11mo ago
I'm still running the old version, and it's using 171MB of memory. That seems excessive already. Granted, I have 128GB, but still....
tcfhgj 11mo ago
If companies needed to pay ressource usage of their apps, the digital world would look nothing like today
- dominojab 11mo ago
  [dead]
- brap 11mo ago
  When I buy a refrigerator, if a model has insane power consumption that makes me think about my electric bill, I’d be less inclined to buy it. The refrigerator manufacturer is going to sell less. So in a way, you can say that they’re definitely paying for those wasted resources. For software companies it’s the same, in a way. They pay whatever the consumers deem appropriate. It’s just that consumers don’t really care for the most part, so the cost is basically $0. RAM is cheap, and if a company prioritizes shipping features over optimizing RAM, that’s almost always going to be the deciding factor.
  - worik 11mo ago
    > RAM is cheap My time isn't
    - brap 11mo ago
      How expensive is it? Is it expensive enough to suffer a month of feature lag? A year of feature lag? A decade of feature lag? Probably not. Regardless, we’re talking about the average user. As the article implies, on average, users’ time is in fact cheap compared to the alternative, or maybe the time cost is simply insignificant.
      - tcfhgj 11mo ago
        What is the alternative? Additional 100k cost per year vs time, energy and hardware for billions of users?
  - hxorr 11mo ago
larodi 11mo ago
Meta is one true guardian of the web!
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
rvz 11mo ago
Pathetic. All this “engineering” from Meta and algorithm acrobatics with hundreds of optimization puzzles and they accept a solution that performs completely far worse in both runtime and space complexity. Whoever believes that this is the acceptable solution from a trillion dollar company would have failed their own interview. No company would accept a huge regression like that and push it to billions of users but Meta. Total amateurs.
dusted 11mo ago
https://dusted.dk/pages/aesthetics-of-programming/The%20Ethical%20Imperative%20of%20Efficient%20Computing.pdf https://dusted.dk/pages/aesthetics-of-programming/The%20Ethi...
sgt 11mo ago
I think Flutter could have been a good compromise here. Build a solid (and cross platform) desktop app in Flutter and have it run on all the major platforms. It'll use a lot less resources and also be quick (assuming they know a bit about UI profiling and eliminating jank).
trallnag 11mo ago
This makes PWAs more and more attractive to me.
iamcalledrob 11mo ago
As the person who designed and fought for this app, I am a bit sad about the change. The native app was by no means perfect, but it felt like a real productivity tool that was trying to be respectful of it's environment. I've come to the conclusion that native desktop apps are just not viable from large companies, even if there is headcount. The problem is coordination cost. If you want to launch new features and experiments here, there and everywhere, then the coordination complexity increases nonlinearly with the number of platforms. If you can sustain a more deliberate, low churn pace of development then it's workable. Features can be well defined and then implemented by the platform team as they see fit. But if you want a more fast-paced, "just in time" style of development, you need to coordinate with every team for every change... wouldn't it be nice to just write web code and be done? Even Microsoft are building this way these days. This is why ironically small companies seem more able to support native apps than large ones. The more "stuff" that's being worked on concurrently, the harder it is to support multiple platforms.
- g-mork 11mo ago
  You're in a very unique position to render a great public service just now - could you point in the direction of the secret storage used for the database key on Windows? I tried to locate it before but could not. Since that DB is about to be bricked it'd be real nice to export from it imminently
  - throw32435678 11mo ago
    [dead]
- sirwhinesalot 11mo ago
  You're absolutely right that the issue is the coordination cost. It's not about the number of resources but just the fact that you need those resources to coordinate, slowing everything down. Not a problem in waterfall, since you can set the targets beforehand and just have the teams work in parallel. In an "Agile" setting though (not the manifesto version, the current practice version)? It's a huge mess. So then the question becomes, is this coordination cost worth it and how much are we willing to "spend". It seems the cost is worth it for Android and iOS since the native app experience on those platforms is so much better. The macOS app is just a tweaked iOS app so it's also easy to justify. But what about Windows? The Microsoft provided APIs are a disaster that keeps getting rewritten every half decade, and even Microsoft barely uses them. Windows users don't have a "feel" for a native app the way macOS and mobile users do, since there hasn't been a "native app experience" on Windows for a very long time. Just look at the 2 context menus on Windows Explorer, they can't even get the sizes and colors between them right. Meta would have been better off doing like Telegram and just using Qt.
shevy-java 11mo ago
Software engineering really took a dive in the last 10 years. For instance, KDE has a daemon that asks for donations, added by Nate "I am the king of KDE". Granted, the daemon is mostly pointless in general and not causing much issues (people are typically only bothered by it once then you can silence it), but just the time people invest here to harass others or add unnecessary software on other computers shows how there is a disregard for people. They simply try to leverage software to abuse people. I am totally against that (both what Meta does and KDE too, ever since Nate became self-proclaimed king of KDE; see also this blog here that showcases how Nate may not be as good as he tries to self-promote himself there - that is the criticism https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde/ https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde... it always comes down to greed; Meta also is very greedy, why do they have spy-apps that eat so much RAM when idle?).
- fransje26 11mo ago
  > https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde/ https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde... That was.. ..an interesting read. The seemingly perpetual need of defaulting back to greed and authoritarianism never ceases to amaze me. I was thinking about switching back to KDE. Well, maybe not after all. Cheerio, as they say.
- wongogue 11mo ago
  Meta and KDE are not comparable. Not even in the same galaxy. This comment is just an excuse to do a hitjob on KDE donations. KDE is FOSS and doesn’t use your data to make money.
  - ndiddy 11mo ago
    Yeah it's an especially bizarre remark because the pop-up isn't a nag, it literally only shows up once per year. It's also demonstrably worked to increase donations to KDE: https://pointieststick.com/2024/12/02/i-think-the-donation-notification-works/ https://pointieststick.com/2024/12/02/i-think-the-donation-n...
- rpgbr 11mo ago
wohoef 11mo ago
But the web app is genuinely unusable. Often times takes 2+ minutes to properly load. This issue seems to be quite random though, not everyone has it.
- pmontra 11mo ago
  I force reloaded it now and it took only a few seconds. It's on CPU from 2014 on a 4G connection. However we are only two data points. Meta probably has a good knowledge of the distribution of the load times. If your spikes in load time are random it could be the connection, the amount of free RAM on your computer in that very moment, or maybe how well it is syncing with your phone. However I don't know how it handles that. It used to require an online phone but it seems that it can do without it now.
guilamu 11mo ago
It seems that anybody mentioning Telegram is downvoted, but I'm gonna try anyway just to add a simple fact: I just looked up the app in my task manager, while being used, the Telegram app is using 24 mb of ram. Telegram has its own faults and issues, but the native Windows app is incredibly good and fast.
saidinesh5 11mo ago
Out of curiosity, Does anyone know where exactly does the bloat of the electron come from in terms of ram usage, compared to a "native toolkit"? Because just parsing html/xml/some declarative ui description to create a scenegraph and pushing it to the GPU is something I'm sure even native frameworks like Qt do. Yet I can feel the latency in vs code vs. say sublime text. It's tempting to blame the huge js blobs trying to create an application abstraction over a document object model but i feel like there should be more to it than just that...
- skydhash 11mo ago
  It’s the extra API and layout rules. A lot of UI toolkit supports some version of xml for declarative UI programming. And they will create a widget tree to match it. But they’re far simpler than the DOM and therefore faster. Also think all the web subsystem that has been added over they years. Every electron app is bundling those in, even the inspector. It’s shipping a whole VM with your code. Containers have at least the decency to strip things down to the bare minimum, but no one is thinning chromium to only what they need.
  - josephg 11mo ago
    Yep. Chrome contains: - HTML rendering - which is insanely complex to do efficiently for arbitrary web apps. - Video conferencing software - A graphics engine. Used for rendering web content, canvas2d, webgl, webgpu and video encoding & decoding for a bunch of formats. It also has a bunch of backends (eg CPU, Metal, Vulcan, etc) - JS, and every feature ever added to JS. - WASM compiler, optimizer & runtime - Memory manager, process isolation per tab, and all the plumbing to make that work. - The Inspector - which contains a debugger and most of an IDE for JS, WASM, CSS and HTML. - So much interop. Like chromecast support, http1, http2, quic, websockets, webtransport, webrtc, javascript remote debugger protocol, support for lots of pre-unicode text formats, DoH, webdriver, and on and on. - Extension support - Gamepad drivers, web bluetooth, webserial, midi support What am I missing? Probably lots of stuff. I have no idea how much each of these components contributes to browser bloat. But all up? Its a lot. Chrome is bigger than most complete operating systems from a decade or two ago. Browser vendors have to pick between fast, simple and fully featured. Chrome sacrifices simplicity every time.
andai 11mo ago
They can't afford to make a native one, huh? You know I heard something funny the other day, someone saying that now thanks to Claude Code, companies might go back to doing actual native support because the specialized knowledge and effort have both been basically automated now. Well, give it a few years!
- pqb 11mo ago
  From article: > WhatsApp for Windows was originally an Electron app, and it was eventually replaced with UWP after years of investment. Four years later, WhatsApp is going back to WebView2, abandoning the original WinUI/UWP native idea. > My understanding is that the recent layoffs at Mark Zuckerberg-headed Meta likely disbanded the entire team behind the native WhatsApp. I don’t see any other reason why Meta would abandon its native app for Windows. Meta will save costs by maintaining the web app codebase on Windows, but you’re going to hate the experience. Giving them more time won't change much if they have resigned from devs in order to save some money.
ale42 11mo ago
Just another reason not to use services based on closed protocols like WhatsApp. With open ones, you can just choose to use another client, even a terminal-based one that uses 2 MB of RAM if you like.
penguin_booze 11mo ago
This app culture is getting out of hand, on all platforms. Why can't people offer and use web browser directly? Isn't that sexy enough?
- SwiftyBug 11mo ago
  You can use WhatsApp on a browser. If you have Chromium installed, you can even "install" WhatsApp as a PWA.
  - rpgbr 11mo ago
    Safari and Firefox as well. In any case, they are all resource hogs.
Yizahi 11mo ago
Heh, when I had to use Whatsapp on Windows for a while for work, it was one of the worst pieces of software I've seen, almost rivaling Skype v7-v8. It was not redesigned for desktop, it was silently crashing minimum twice a day every day, and that's under very light use. You are telling me it got even worse? :)
wiz21c 11mo ago
How many new desktop/laptop will be bought because RAM will be to small...
herunan 11mo ago
Complacency is the enemy of innovation. So many other chat clients are way better, yet WhatsApp is irreplaceable because it enjoys the competitive advantage of network effects.
InMice 11mo ago
Will it be like signal now... it's supposed to be a web app but it still needs to update every single time i sit down at my computer. And after every update there is not a single perceptible change.
- emeril 11mo ago
  it's not so terrible but yes, def not a true native app
Aerroon 11mo ago
I used to play a 3D MMO (Lineage 2) with hundreds of people on screen with spell effects, sounds etc on a computer with 512 MB of RAM. I was also running a mIRC client in rooms with hundreds to thousands of people at once. And I was able to do both at the same time. Now that computer can't even run 1v1 chat.
tonyhart7 11mo ago
this is why web wins, not because its the best but cost cheaper
nikolay 11mo ago
Well, Messenger and Facebook were the same, and they just phased out Messenger. One of the largest tech companies in the world cannot afford to hire a team of Windows native app developers! Shame on Meta!
redbell 11mo ago
I feel this trend is going to stick for the upcoming years! It's not just Meta, every big player there is adopting this mentality. Take Microsoft for instance, they have been pushing heavily what they called the New Outlook, which is basically a web-based client mirroring Outlook on the web (OWA) , packed into an EXE file (not sure if it is Electronized or not)! Then, they renamed the real native Outlook app as Classic Outlook to feel old-fashioned and outdated and as result, we ended up losing some core features that made Outlook, Outlook. We lose: COM Add-ins and VBA Macros, MAPI Support, Word as Email Editor, .PST File Support.. to name a few.. This would be probably one of the reasons contributing to the Collapse of Civilization (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317)
- stilley2 11mo ago
  Speaking of new outlook, has anyone else had search just...not work? I'll search for emails sent from myself, to myself (of which I know there are hundreds) and get 7 results. Same in the web app, but outlook classic works fine. Mind boggling
  - rubenvanwyk 11mo ago
    Search on Outlook is horrendous. Our company bought Copilot just so people can start searching their e-mails.
    - stilley2 11mo ago
      I wonder if it's intentional and making everyone get copilot is the goal
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
  - wobfan 11mo ago
    I mean they need the resources to switch from native, to UWP, to web, and then start over again in 2 years. How do you think should they manage to fix such a unnecessary thing like search in the meantime? But fear not! As we learnt from Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI, in early 2026, 100% of the code will be created by GenAI. Finally we can have native apps with working core-functionality. Can't wait for it!
outime 11mo ago
It's always the same discussions here whenever a company decides to use Electron or a similar solution. It's beyond tiring to see the same arguments being repeated. A company's goal is to make money by optimizing its resources. What benefits would Meta gain by maintaining native apps for WhatsApp across the three major operating systems? I can tell you: absolutely none, only negatives. Nobody except a negligible fraction of users would care about native performance or idle memory consumption. No one is going to switch to Signal or whatever the flavor-of-the-year messaging app is because of this. It would be a different story if WhatsApp were to lose a significant portion of its user base due to the app becoming unusable or extremely slow. But for the vast majority, this change will go unnoticed or frankly won't matter at all. So, expect most companies to continue adopting Electron-like apps (for the few that still have native apps anyway) for exactly the same reasons. Sorry to be blunt, but it's really tiresome to see these discussions going around in circles here. It’s pointless to keep debating this, it's not going to change. If one day a framework emerges that's comparable to Electron (or something similar) but requires fewer resources to develop against, I could see Meta and other companies considering it... provided the migration costs aren’t too high. But again, no end-user truly cares about this.
tacker2000 11mo ago
The problem is Whatsapp is now being used more and more in a professional context, even in Europe, and it's just not a pro software by any means. Searching for old messages is a pain, the web version is slow, there is now optimized overview or folders, etc... And now it seems that there is not even a benefit to installing the native vbersion, they will probably do the same for Mac also now.
- rpgbr 11mo ago
  I'm not defending WhatsApp by any means, but “professional” chat apps are equally bad — MS Teams, Slack etc. I long for a simple, stable chat app that doesn't change every other day. Maybe we should all go back to IRC.
- Bayko 11mo ago
  My Brazilian friend told me they use Whatsapp as a replacement for Slack since they don't want to pay for Slack As an Indian, I can confirm the same here for many companies
onion2k 11mo ago
It probably isn't really using that much but it will have reserved that much. V8 reserves memory in chunks of 256MB using virtualalloc with MEM_RESERVE on Windows (I think). It has to do that for each isolated process where an isolate is a tab, webview, worker, etc. A page that's built up from 4 isolated processes will reserve 1GB of RAM. That's only virtual alloc though, so other OS processes can take the memory if they really need it. There is essentially no way to tell if a JS app is using a lot of memory just by looking at what the process has reserved. There's loads of things that end up in that space - cached pages, cached compiled code, cached bitmaps of rendered pages, etc. The task monitor tells you what Chrome or Chromium (e.g. Electron) is doing, not what the web app is doing. There is a good argument to suggest Chromium is hogging more than it should. That's not really WhatsApp's fault though.
- wobfan 11mo ago
  > That's not really WhatsApp's fault though. I mean, you could argue that you're at fault when you're choosing a platform that literally eats your RAM. They're not at fault that the platform is shit. But they could have chosen another platform. Or, even better, just use the existing, most of the time perfectly working app, and optimize it. They had no resources to build the new features for every single platform that they offer native clients for? I could not imagine any other app for which this would be more hypocritical. Give me the iOS WhatsApp IPA from 2016, or even earlier, and the Windows Chromium Wrapper from 2018, and I will tell you neither me nor probably 98% percent of users will notice any difference in feature, let alone design.
cudgy 11mo ago
Me found hammer/react/shiny web framework … must use to make everything. No care about users.
hudo 11mo ago
What did we do wrong when simple chat app requires hundrets of megabytes of memory, or even gigabytes! Sure, its not just plain text but images and videos, but still...
Departed7405 11mo ago
As a Linux user, I am glad to see Whatshapp Web App isn't going away anytime so.
EionRobb 11mo ago
The Pidgin plugin for WhatsApp uses very little ram, if people are looking for low-ram alternatives. Although doesn't support calling. (disclaimer, I help out a little with that plugin, amongst others for Pidgin-
- mostlyk 11mo ago
  Aren't they against using the reverse engineered API and you posses a risk of ban?
postalrat 11mo ago
Want to know why web based UIs keep winning? It's simple: native UI APIs are terrible.
philjw 11mo ago
Just set-up a linux machine with Pidgin Messenger and XMPP last week like in the old days. It used to bundle MSN, ICQ, IRC and everything in one messenger - super resource efficient. Unfortulately I cannot reach many contacts that way these days but it showed me how inefficient applications became by using more abstraction layers. Same on my Mac - it uses almost 16GB of RAM in idle mode with some Tabs, VSCode and Figma open - How did we get here? edit: Just saw another comment mentioning there is a WhatsApp plugin for Pidgin. Awesome!
DANmode 11mo ago
…what did the other client max out at? At least look back at the color of the other grass!
mostlyk 11mo ago
We just wish https://github.com/tulir/whatsmeow https://github.com/tulir/whatsmeow didn't ban devs from using it. WhatsApp started off great and can be great again.
rs38 11mo ago
not sure how much resources it took from my WinARM Win11 as store app, but it's buggy in either release or beta since months as it loses network connectivity after some time...
nicr_22 11mo ago
There's a whole spectrum of options between super-fat React-in-Electron and expert-optimized platform-specific (perhaps GPU-rendered) apps. VS Code and Zed are close to opposite ends of this spectrum. - slim down to a more efficient, non-virtual-DOM web stack (e. g hypermedia) - move to a wrapper around native webview (Tauri) - use one of the excellent cross-platform frameworks (Flutter, or that new one just open sourced by Snap) For WhatsApp specifically, I don't understand why a company with the size and resources of Meta can't support native versions for Windows, Mac _and_ Linux. I think many people would accept non-feature-parity with the web/mobile versions, in exchange for a tight, reliable desktop messaging app...
- Klonoar 11mo ago
  > move to a wrapper around native webview (Tauri) WhatsApp now is using a native webview, at least they're using Webview2 on Windows.
Jotalea 11mo ago
to be honest, both the old web-based and the previous native apps were equally bad. I don't have too many memories of the old web-based app, but I remember perfectly fine that performing a simple contact search on a quite powerful laptop (Ryzen 7 3700U, 12GB RAM) took 5 entire seconds to type 1 letter, and it made the laptop feel like it was running on an Intel Pentium. meanwhile, the web-based version in the browser was nearly instant. I should try the new web-based app to perform benchmarks, but I think I'll just keep using the browser. I'll also mention, the "whatsapp web" website is extremely resource intensive, and in my laptop it makes the CPU usage ramp up to 100% very often, and using WhatsApp while having any other programs or even browser tabs open becomes unbelievably annoying. the desktop takes 700MB, the web browser takes 400MB, and WhatsApp web takes at least 1GB alone. this is on Arch Linux, with 4GB of DDR4 RAM.
lousken 11mo ago
peak entshittification moment for whatsapp, i am assuming this was vibecoded using llama 4?
HacklesRaised 11mo ago
I'm not saying Steve Jobs is turning in his grave, i'm saying it's like Cirque de Soleil in there. There are far too few people who truly advocate for the user, and it is this dereliction that has fuelled the race to the bottom. It's not a matter of native libraries versus x-platform solutions versus W3, it's about valuing UX over DX at EVERY TURN. It's about educating yourself as to the resource and performance consequence of the technologies you are advocating for.
ghtbircshotbe 11mo ago
So what is the best way to make your web app more efficient, if possible?
Fire-Dragon-DoL 11mo ago
I'll go against the tide and say: this is the reason why Linux desktop is more and more viable. I installed omarchy and realized that yes, all the apps I use except the terminal, are browser apps, so I don't need a desktop environment at all.
willywanker 10mo ago
What passes for a desktop app these anyway is just some variation of Electron - bundle the website along with a Chrome instance and serve up the resulting 300-400 MB bundle as a 'desktop' app. Who gives a crap about keyboard and mouse focused platform UI/UX conventions. Visually and functionally there's no difference between opening Whatsapp Web and installing this - both the earlier version and now.

436 points by DearAll 11mo ago

dangus 11mo ago

People use WhatsApp on the computer? From the Windows Store of all places? Must be a tiny percentage, which is why this version is now a basic web wrapper now. Anyway, I’d remind everyone that “using” RAM doesn’t mean “would not function with less RAM.” Many applications just use a lot if it’s available. RAM is not really something you explicitly ration.

Bolwin 11mo ago
I use it extensively. For years Whatsapp had a lovely native windows app and now they're replacing it with this horrible bloated thing
Dylan16807 11mo ago
> Anyway, I’d remind everyone that “using” RAM doesn’t mean “would not function with less RAM.” > Many applications just use a lot if it’s available. Some of that memory isn't going to be touched again, and will eventually be moved to swap, but it still pushed things out of RAM to be there and is a troublemaker. The rest of that memory will be needed again, so if it gets swapped out it'll lag badly when you switch back to the program. Either way 99% of programs are not doing any kind of intelligent use of spare memory. If you see them doing something that looks wasteful, that's because they're being wasteful. The one thing to remember is that at the OS level, disk cache pretty much qualifies as free memory. But that's unrelated to this issue.
1over137 11mo ago
> RAM is not really something you explicitly ration. I guess this modern attitude is how we are where we are. RAM is absolutely a scarce precious resource that we optimize for. At least we used to, and some of us still do.
- brabel 11mo ago
  I have 64GB of RAM and between IDE, some Docker containers and a local LLM, that started feeling like too little already. It’s just never enough, we always find creative ways to use every byte that’s available. Oh and the browser (any browser, I tried many) just takes up 1GB per tab it seems. It’s insane. My old 8GB laptop is nearly unusable now and can barely be used to browse the internet and very little else. I can at least keep coding on emacs. Who would think emacs would one day be an example of a lean app!?
- dangus 11mo ago
  Define “scarce.” A pair of 16GB modules (32GB total) is around $100. You can buy an entire complete mini PC including 16GB of modular RAM for $240 on AliExpress. I’m not saying “don’t optimize.” I’m saying that watching your task manager, seeing a big number and freaking out isn’t really the definition of unacceptable performance.
snthpy 11mo ago
I also use it a lot but the app has always been terrible. I forget exactly what the problems are but I think the text input becomes unresponsive and it becomes unusable.
tolciho 11mo ago
> Anyway, I’d remind everyone that “using” RAM doesn’t mean “would not function with less RAM.” Except when something really does need more RAM, and fails. LLVM for example having, somehow, become a bit chonky and now fails to compile on 32-bit OpenBSD systems because it wants more memory than is available. Less bloated software of course does not suffer from this problem, and continues to run on still functional 32-bit systems. > Many applications just use a lot if it’s available. Xorg is using 92M, irssi 21M (bloated, but I've been lazy about finding something leaner), xenodm 12M. That's the top three. Oh, Windows? Yeah. About that. Best you can hope for is not to catch too much of the splatter. (What passes for Mac OS X these days also seems fairly dismal.) > RAM is not really something you explicitly ration. Paperclips were hung on the rack doors to make it easier to poke the wee little red reset button when some poorly written software went all gibblesquik (as poorly written software is wont to do) and the OOM killer could not cope and, whelp, reset time. Elsewhere, RAM is explicitly rationed—perhaps certain aspects of timesharing have been somewhat forgotten in this benighted era of bloat?—and malloc will return NULL, something certain programmers often fail to check for, which is generally followed by the kernel taking the error-ridden code out back and shooting it.
eviks 11mo ago
Before reminding everyone of a theory, did you check where that theory applies in this discussion of an app in practice? Also, even in theory the issue isn't only with "wouldn't function", but "would function slower due to eg disk swaps / cause other apps to function slower".
- dangus 11mo ago
  Well, the author of the article sure didn’t check. They just opened the task manager and got mad.
  - eviks 11mo ago
    He did, via the task manager. You're the one saying high RAM utilization doesn't matter because 'wrong reasons in theory and in practice', so it's on you to check and confirm it so that you could be correct at least in practice in this specific case
    - dangus 11mo ago
      Okay, it’s on me. Send me to jail.
      - eviks 11mo ago
        Oh, man, how can you be wrong about everything? Here is the author noticing performance issues, he's even in a "but in theory it doesn't have to be slow" camp that's closer to yours: > An app can use a lot of memory, and it does not necessarily mean it’s a performance nightmare, but the issue with the new WhatsApp is that it feels sluggish. You’re going to notice sluggish performance, long loading time, and other performance issues when browsing different conversations.
vrighter 11mo ago
"RAM is not really something you explicitly ration." It most certainly is. My old pc ran on 8MB of ram. Modern ones need 16GB for a comfortable experience. They do not do much more than I needed back then. I think it's reasonable to expect a simple chat app to not take up 128 times as much memory as my entire PC had when I was young.
- miellaby 11mo ago
  2048 times
  - vrighter 10mo ago
    I was being generous and assuming the chat app "only" used 1GB of ram.
- dangus 11mo ago
  I don’t think that’s a reasonable expectation at all. That’s like saying “oh well we landed on the moon with a turd burger of a computer so that means I shouldn’t need more than 8kb of memory!” Okay but I’m not trying to land on the moon, I’m trying to have an HD group video call and maybe play Cyberpunk in 4K later. Let me ask you, how much did that 8MB of RAM cost you back in the day? I bet it was more than the $100 it costs to get 32GB of RAM or the $200 it costs to get 64GB. Before you apply inflation!
  - vrighter 11mo ago
    it sent text messages, and received them. Ok now I can send some pictures and audio clips. I would understand a 10x increase, but not literal gigabytes. I have more memory so i can do more things, not so I can do the same things only slightly slower than I could before.
miellaby 11mo ago
The keyword you missed is 'idle'. An app should use as much Ram as needed to cache computation and network as it runs. But it shouldn't do when in the background. The Ram used here is not for accelerating the user experience. It's for the internal functioning of the managed language (Javascript) and virtual machine (Dom and browser API) because it has been packaged as a full Chrome clone running a single web app.
mrweasel 11mo ago
Honestly I think you're mostly correct. The amount of people using WhatsApp on the desktop is probably rather limited, certainly in the scope of WhatsApp usage in general. Memory, while I feel that a gigabyte is way to much for what is essentially a chat app, it is virtual memory, so it's not as problematic as I'd like it to be. The issue, I think, is who the desktop users are. They sales people, they are people who conduct business over WhatsApp. The buyers at a previous job uses whatever the sellers in Asia, eastern Europe and the middle east are using. A long time ago, that was mostly Skype, now it WhatsApp. There a huge benefit to having WhatsApp on your desktop, with easy copy/paste, Excel and everything you need to make the deals. Maybe Meta doesn't believe you should do business over WhatsApp and don't wont to cater to that crowed. I would love to see what a professional Windows application developer, if those are still around, could do with a native WhatsApp client. Using modern C++, or just C# and all the tooling provided by the platform, how small and functional could you actually make something like that.
- dangus 11mo ago
  I agree about this potential of most WhatsApp users residing in markets with less powerful median hardware. Still, I think the experience reported is very similar to running Chrome, and I think any laptop with 8GB of RAM can handle the application plus Excel and a web browser (or just run WhatsApp in the browser) just fine. A complete mini PC with 16GB RAM, 512GB storage, and a relatively modern processor goes for like $240 on AliExpress. And that’s before you consider used hardware.
  - mrweasel 11mo ago
    It would be interesting in knowing how many feel like I do. Running an application in a browser window or tab is measure of last resort. People already have tens of tabs, if not hundreds, and multiple browser windows open, stuffing an application into one for those are terrible for the user experience. That's a worse solution than a web wrapper. It's much easier to locate an application that has it's own process and presence in the operating system.
    - 11mo ago

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

whatsupdog 11mo ago

For someone who travels a lot, I would love to have the ability to have WhatsApp on multiple phones (like telegram). I have a separate phone for traveling to US/Canada, which I usually wipe clean before crossing. It's really cumbersome to backup/restore Whatsapp messages from one phone to another. Or I just lose the messages that I send/receive while traveling.

lxn 11mo ago
You can install Whatsapp on up to four or five devices. There one main device, and the rest are "clients", exactly like the desktop apps. But they can send and receive messages even when the main device is offline.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- whatsupdog 11mo ago
  I was under the impression that they all must be on the same wifi.
  - tcfhgj 11mo ago
    this isn't the case anymore, now they are independent clients
egl2020 11mo ago
What do you put on the cleaned phone?
- BoredPositron 11mo ago
  Entering/Leaving is the biggest problem with US travel and hardware. In the time inbetween you can just use it like a normal phone.
- whatsupdog 11mo ago
  I have all my data and passwords etc., mostly on nextcloud at my home. After crossing the border I login into whatever accounts I need to and download whatever files I need. When it's time to cross again, I do a factory reset.

arunc 11mo ago

I don't mind as long as I can make calls from the app. The call feature isn't available on Linux/Web app unfortunately.

plotti 11mo ago

It's a piece of shit and they know they can get away with it. Omg why are there no open protocols on Instant messengIng like email. Europe should enforce it.

bauruine 11mo ago
You mean like Matrix or XMPP? They just aren't as ubiquitous as email unfortunately.
- the_gipsy 11mo ago
  At least you can bridge WhatsApp and then use whatever client you like.
  - p0w3n3d 11mo ago
    how to?
    - p0w3n3d 11mo ago
      I mean I know that I can google it up but I'm looking for a working example. I found some code in github that is obsolete. Also whatsapp requires phone code and qr scan so looks like it's designed to prevent a server-only bridge.
      - the_gipsy 11mo ago
        I got it running with NixOS https://github.com/benjajaja/nixos-rk3588/tree/main https://github.com/benjajaja/nixos-rk3588/tree/main WhatsApp does work, I use it on a daily basis. The bot/bridge makes it easy to log in with the QR code. You need to keep the phone app as you need to open it at least once a month or so. HMU if you need more info.
        p0w3n3d 10mo ago
        thanks!

Barrin92 11mo ago

I can understand (although I'd still think it's a bad idea) going with a web app wrapper if you're starting out that way, but what makes this decision truly baffling is that they already had a UWP app. Meta makes more money than god and there's over a billion WhatsApp users. It's not like this thing is Blender or a AAA game, it's a chat frontend. Maintaining it has to be a rounding error in the budget.

tonymet 11mo ago

Ms Edge offers webview2 which should share a single browser engine and profile (like your browser has tabs ) I wonder if they avoided that so they could use Electron and target MacOS / Linux too

galad87 11mo ago
The macOS app is the iOS app running on macOS thanks to Catalyst, hopefully they won't replace it with that Electron/WebViewOfTheDay crap.
conradludgate 11mo ago
TFA claims it is using WebView2

eviks 11mo ago

> WhatsApp is one of those Windows apps that went from being a web wrapper to a native app and then back to the web again after all these years of investment. We often hear stories about the speed of development and the issues of maintaining native apps, and then there are these rewrites every few years. Don't they waste more resources vs. creating / fixing the gaps in the native app? And this isn't somes quick startup prototype app that can flop and the effort would be wasted

MrBuddyCasino 11mo ago
How many chat apps did Google launch and kill? Its all about incentives: how to get that promotion. Maintaining a well working, established app isn’t going to get you anywhere.
andy_ppp 11mo ago
It’s probably a coup internally and some idiot who sucked up to the right people made a load of bad technical decisions. But at least they got promoted!
- andy_ppp 11mo ago
  I’m pretending to myself this has largely got so many upvotes from the accused persons colleagues :-D
phito 11mo ago
From what I've seen web devs spend a huge portion of their time upgrading their dependencies, fighting with frameworks (they all curse react), or moving to the latest cool bundler.
swiftcoder 11mo ago
Nobody ever got promo for not rewriting the app
qcnguy 11mo ago
You're assuming the bugs/gaps can be fixed. The native frameworks on Windows suck so hard even Microsoft don't use them. If you build on them you're going to encounter lots of bugs and missing features that you can't easily work around, nor fix (they aren't open source), and which Chrome doesn't suffer from.

rock_artist 11mo ago

I use WhatsApp web and avoided the apps on desktop. Yet, I really don't understand why WhatsApp would need app especially with the state mentioned here (which is a basic wrapper) There are no calls in the web app, but modern web stack is more than enough to provide all the real functionality needed for it.

happymellon 11mo ago
Indeed, the desktop app provides absolutely nothing. If it allowed me to do video calls from a laptop, that could be useful but obviously that can't be a feature they therefore offer.
- phonon 11mo ago
  > If it allowed me to do video calls from a laptop It does though? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3FkkHyvw8M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3FkkHyvw8M
  - rkomorn 11mo ago
    Yeah, calls are the only I installed the Windows desktop app instead of using WhatsApp Web.
  - happymellon 11mo ago
    Sorry I should have been clearer. According to this not any more.
- mrweasel 11mo ago
  Apparently what it provided was a more lightweight experience at 1/10th the RAM consumption.
  - blitzar 11mo ago
    maybe they will provide a lite.whatsapp.com version (someone add it to the corporate vision board please)

deanCommie 11mo ago

What's missing from this history though is that when WhatsApp went from an Electron app to a native windows app it got decisively worse.

officerk 11mo ago

Shouldn't it be easier to maintain multiple versions of the same app because of the better productivity AI gives you?

meindnoch 11mo ago
You're absolutely right!

emsign 11mo ago

That must be part of their new AI strategy, tapping into their users potential.

jeisc 11mo ago

Their great AI coding agent could not keep the native app working?

userbinator 11mo ago
Unfortunately I don't think a vibe-coded native app would be that much better either.
- InsideOutSanta 11mo ago
  True, but it's funny how C-level people at these companies mention the apparently ever-increasing percentage of their code that is written by LLMs every chance they get, but can't even maintain a relatively simple Windows application. Zuck, six months ago: “Within 12 to 18 months, most of the code will be written by AI. And I don’t mean autocomplete.” Meta, today: "Maintaining this basic Windows app is just too much work."

thunderbong 11mo ago

If most Windows users are using WhatsApp web on Microsoft Edge then making it an app like this saves them a huge chunk of effort in maintaining two apps (WhatsApp web and a separate Windows app)

userbinator 11mo ago

I remember doing voice and video calls, and of course IM, on a PC with 128MB of RAM and a single core CPU around the turn of the century. It's amazing how far we've regressed in efficency.

retube 11mo ago
I had a think pad with 32 mb of RAM and it did everything fine
- dotancohen 11mo ago
  You weren't being tracked then, and targetted advertising was not as developed as it is today. Those features take client resources too to run.
fmbb 11mo ago
> It's amazing how far we've regressed in efficency. I don’t think we have. This is always what efficiency leads to, higher resource consumption. The phenomenon was described already in the 1800s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox JS and the web has seen performance improvements. They lead to more ads being served and more code being released faster to users.
- specproc 11mo ago
  A reasonable comment, unfairly downvoted. That said, I do firmly agree with the parent: there is choice involved here, engineering decisions. The Microsoft world is particularly bloated, as they insist on shoehorning in unwanted anti-features into their OS. Much more efficient operating systems (and ways of building a chat client) exist. Jevon's paradox may describe a general tendency, but it's no excuse for awful software.
  - fmbb 11mo ago
    Oh it’s not an excuse for anything. It is just an observation about our economic system.

alex1138 11mo ago

Sometimes antitrust is a hard decision. Where do you draw the line, there are natural monopolies, etc so on so forth Whatsapp screams antitrust. If you look in the dictionary for antitrust, you see Whatsapp https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122

squarefoot 11mo ago

Electron again? If they really can't develop a native interface, could they alt least consider Tauri?

conradludgate 11mo ago
It isn't electron. It's WebView2 which is also what tauri would be using on windows
- squarefoot 11mo ago
  Thanks for the correction. Then wondering even more where all those wasted resources go.

ZeroConcerns 11mo ago

Well, the reason for the replacement seems pretty obvious: they're shipping new features on the web that aren't matched by the native client, and apparently that was just too hard to update for a multibillion AI-powered behemoth. So, a wrapper it is! You may not like that from a 'native look and feel' point of view, but the question 'what is a native Windows app these days anyway' is very much unanswerable, and you can actually implement stuff like this in a performant and offline-sensitive way. But, yeah, by the time the resulting GPU worker process balloons up to 400MB, that pretty much goes out of the window. I'm actually sort-of impressed, in that I have no idea how I would even make that happen! But that's why I don't work at a powerhouse like Meta, I guess...

hliyan 11mo ago
I've been wondering whether it's time to reserve browsers for their original purpose of reading documents and move web applications to a different paradigm: perhaps native controls/windows rendered and controlled by cross-platform markup served over the web, running on a "headless" sandbox. Perhaps a bit like React Native, but JIT compiled on the client. Not sure if this already exists. I'd really like to have native UI controls back for applications.
- hoppp 11mo ago
  The majority of people use web browsers to run applications because every website nowadays is a huge blob of js. Maybe what you thinking is a wasm runtime like wasmer.
- GoblinSlayer 11mo ago
  https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qmlreference.html https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qmlreference.html
  - hliyan 11mo ago
    Yes, but QT is precompiled. If QML can be served over the web and JIT compiled locally, that might be closer to what I'm talking about.

miohtama 11mo ago

You can use WhatsApp in your browser: web.whatsapp.com No 1 GB or installation needed Why is the desktop app even a thing?

brabel 11mo ago
The desktop app is very good for quickly attaching pictures and documents, or receiving them, I find it harder to do that on the phone app , and a web app just doesn’t work very well when you want it open all the time. Same with Slack, having a desktop app really improves things.
- runiq 11mo ago
  > a web app just doesn’t work very well when you want it open all the time. Pin tab, problem solved?
  - omnifischer 11mo ago
    No. People are stupid. They love when taskbar (rightbottom) is flooded with icons and constantly blink to disturb when using device while sucking tons of CPU/memory. /s
  - Arainach 11mo ago
    Now you have to switch apps to the browser, find which browser window has the session you want, switch to the tab, etc., instead of just switching to WhatsApp app via keyboard or taskbar directly. The ergonomics are significantly worse. I want most of my browser windows full screen. I don't want my instant messenger full screen. Using it in a browser means I have to have one size, and resizing one changes the other. The experience of using a native app is far superior.
    - rkomorn 11mo ago
      I use the WhatsApp Web PWA and it allows me to have a dedicated window/app for it? Sure it's a little quirky at times (eg it closes if the browser restarts for update) and it doesn't have a system tray icon, but aside from that, it behaves like a separate app.

athanagor2 11mo ago

> You’d realise how bad this is when I tell you the benchmarks for the native WhatsApp for comparison. I tested the old/native WhatsApp, and it uses just 190MB most of the time, dropping to less than 100MB when it’s completely idle. At worst, it would reach 300MB, which can happen only when the chat is really active. Well sounds like a lot of useless work was being done then, how does it gobble 100MB when idle? Are the protocols that complex? Just do as I do and open web.whatsapp.com in your favorite browser

galad87 11mo ago
web.whatsapp.com is still going to use more RAM than the old native version.
GoblinSlayer 11mo ago
I think Zoom is like that too and uses some obscure chinese GUI library.

pjmlp 11mo ago

Just use the Web client instead. Another example of WinUI anemic state.

fx1994 11mo ago

Who even uses WA when there is blazing fast and feature pumped Telegram. ps. it even has a portable edition. Goat.

pta2002 11mo ago

I do want to point out, as someone who uses the WhatsApp app (to me, it’s slightly more convenient than the web version) that the old native windows app was /awful/. It looked native enough, but it just didn’t work. For as long as I remember it would randomly stop accepting input into the text field and I’d have to restart the app, and this was insanely frequent. Typing dead keys was also randomly broken with accents not coming through, which is really annoying if you’re trying to sound professional on a language that requires them. The new electron app does take more resources, but at the very least it works.

dotancohen 11mo ago
Have you tried telegram desktop to compare? I don't use whatsapp, but I have never had a performance problem with telegram desktop and I've been using it for years on underpowered machines. I usually run some variant of Debian on them.
- wohoef 11mo ago
  Yeah I tried telegram. None of my contacts did though…
  - dotancohen 10mo ago
    Yeah, I'm sure that a lot of people notice the same thing then uninstall it. It's one of the solutions to the Fermi paradox, that both people have telegram installed at the same time.
vitorgrs 11mo ago
If is anything like the WhatsApp Web, "works" might be optimistic choice of word. When I switched from Windows, the thing that I missed from Windows on Linux was the native WhatsApp App. Now they killed there, so feeling better on my switch now!
- naIak 11mo ago
  The WhatsApp web app is not perfect (no software is) but I’ve never had any major issues with it. It’s snappy and very rarely does it glitch out. I find your comment surprising.

kakacik 11mo ago

Ah yes the high quality engineering FB is famous for. Remember when their mobile app was snooping on users (probably microphone but who knows what else) some years ago so it was 'mysteriously' draining the battery when not used? Either unacceptable level of crap engineering consistently across quite a few updates from such a big wealthy company or... worse. I don't believe engineers there would be so bad consistently, so to me its pretty clear given overall behavior of company and its owner. I was very happy with that situation - it was the last and good enough reason to uninstall all FB-related apps from phone, and never looked back. That company (and not only that) is a cancer to whole society, as per design.

alex1138 11mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122

k_sze 11mo ago

Erm, so why wouldn’t I just use WhatsApp as a PWA? I wouldn’t even need to waste the disk space for yet another browser runtime.

mdasen 11mo ago
When you're using WebView2, it uses Windows' built-in browser runtime (Chromium/Edge). Electron ships a browser runtime, but the article notes they're using WebView2.

drivebyhooting 11mo ago

Off topic but I hate being forced to use Facebook properties like WhatsApp. I’m forced to be in parent group chats in this accursed ecosystem and give Zuck another DAU.

tcfhgj 11mo ago
Why are you forced to be in parent group chats?
- blitzar 11mo ago
  Well ... when a mummy and a daddy love each other very much
  - herbst 11mo ago
    ... You'll end up being forced into WhatsApp groups? Sounds dangerous
    - johnisgood 11mo ago
      Yeah, why not something else? There are a lot of better alternatives. Matrix (Element) although does the search functionality work yet? It sucked ass. I wonder if it works now. Even Telegram is better, then there is Signal, Briar, and XMPP, too. They are fully featured ones. If you are fine with text only, then Ricochet Refresh is the best candidate as far as privacy goes.
      - herbst 11mo ago
        Most parents I know dont even allow their children WhatsApp (as you said there are safer alternatives like Signal without weird social network functions you can barely control) so why would parents use it? For me this just sounds nonsensical. I am sure it makes sense somewhere in the world
        11mo ago

icar 11mo ago

I wish they used an SDK and published that, so we could build better clients.

paulmooreparks 11mo ago

I'm still running the old version, and it's using 171MB of memory. That seems excessive already. Granted, I have 128GB, but still....

tcfhgj 11mo ago

If companies needed to pay ressource usage of their apps, the digital world would look nothing like today

dominojab 11mo ago
[dead]
brap 11mo ago
When I buy a refrigerator, if a model has insane power consumption that makes me think about my electric bill, I’d be less inclined to buy it. The refrigerator manufacturer is going to sell less. So in a way, you can say that they’re definitely paying for those wasted resources. For software companies it’s the same, in a way. They pay whatever the consumers deem appropriate. It’s just that consumers don’t really care for the most part, so the cost is basically $0. RAM is cheap, and if a company prioritizes shipping features over optimizing RAM, that’s almost always going to be the deciding factor.
- worik 11mo ago
  > RAM is cheap My time isn't
  - brap 11mo ago
    How expensive is it? Is it expensive enough to suffer a month of feature lag? A year of feature lag? A decade of feature lag? Probably not. Regardless, we’re talking about the average user. As the article implies, on average, users’ time is in fact cheap compared to the alternative, or maybe the time cost is simply insignificant.
    - tcfhgj 11mo ago
      What is the alternative? Additional 100k cost per year vs time, energy and hardware for billions of users?
- hxorr 11mo ago

larodi 11mo ago

Meta is one true guardian of the web!

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

rvz 11mo ago

Pathetic. All this “engineering” from Meta and algorithm acrobatics with hundreds of optimization puzzles and they accept a solution that performs completely far worse in both runtime and space complexity. Whoever believes that this is the acceptable solution from a trillion dollar company would have failed their own interview. No company would accept a huge regression like that and push it to billions of users but Meta. Total amateurs.

dusted 11mo ago

https://dusted.dk/pages/aesthetics-of-programming/The%20Ethical%20Imperative%20of%20Efficient%20Computing.pdf https://dusted.dk/pages/aesthetics-of-programming/The%20Ethi...

sgt 11mo ago

I think Flutter could have been a good compromise here. Build a solid (and cross platform) desktop app in Flutter and have it run on all the major platforms. It'll use a lot less resources and also be quick (assuming they know a bit about UI profiling and eliminating jank).

trallnag 11mo ago

This makes PWAs more and more attractive to me.

iamcalledrob 11mo ago

As the person who designed and fought for this app, I am a bit sad about the change. The native app was by no means perfect, but it felt like a real productivity tool that was trying to be respectful of it's environment. I've come to the conclusion that native desktop apps are just not viable from large companies, even if there is headcount. The problem is coordination cost. If you want to launch new features and experiments here, there and everywhere, then the coordination complexity increases nonlinearly with the number of platforms. If you can sustain a more deliberate, low churn pace of development then it's workable. Features can be well defined and then implemented by the platform team as they see fit. But if you want a more fast-paced, "just in time" style of development, you need to coordinate with every team for every change... wouldn't it be nice to just write web code and be done? Even Microsoft are building this way these days. This is why ironically small companies seem more able to support native apps than large ones. The more "stuff" that's being worked on concurrently, the harder it is to support multiple platforms.

g-mork 11mo ago
You're in a very unique position to render a great public service just now - could you point in the direction of the secret storage used for the database key on Windows? I tried to locate it before but could not. Since that DB is about to be bricked it'd be real nice to export from it imminently
- throw32435678 11mo ago
  [dead]
sirwhinesalot 11mo ago
You're absolutely right that the issue is the coordination cost. It's not about the number of resources but just the fact that you need those resources to coordinate, slowing everything down. Not a problem in waterfall, since you can set the targets beforehand and just have the teams work in parallel. In an "Agile" setting though (not the manifesto version, the current practice version)? It's a huge mess. So then the question becomes, is this coordination cost worth it and how much are we willing to "spend". It seems the cost is worth it for Android and iOS since the native app experience on those platforms is so much better. The macOS app is just a tweaked iOS app so it's also easy to justify. But what about Windows? The Microsoft provided APIs are a disaster that keeps getting rewritten every half decade, and even Microsoft barely uses them. Windows users don't have a "feel" for a native app the way macOS and mobile users do, since there hasn't been a "native app experience" on Windows for a very long time. Just look at the 2 context menus on Windows Explorer, they can't even get the sizes and colors between them right. Meta would have been better off doing like Telegram and just using Qt.

shevy-java 11mo ago

Software engineering really took a dive in the last 10 years. For instance, KDE has a daemon that asks for donations, added by Nate "I am the king of KDE". Granted, the daemon is mostly pointless in general and not causing much issues (people are typically only bothered by it once then you can silence it), but just the time people invest here to harass others or add unnecessary software on other computers shows how there is a disregard for people. They simply try to leverage software to abuse people. I am totally against that (both what Meta does and KDE too, ever since Nate became self-proclaimed king of KDE; see also this blog here that showcases how Nate may not be as good as he tries to self-promote himself there - that is the criticism https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde/ https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde... it always comes down to greed; Meta also is very greedy, why do they have spy-apps that eat so much RAM when idle?).

fransje26 11mo ago
> https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde/ https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde... That was.. ..an interesting read. The seemingly perpetual need of defaulting back to greed and authoritarianism never ceases to amaze me. I was thinking about switching back to KDE. Well, maybe not after all. Cheerio, as they say.
wongogue 11mo ago
Meta and KDE are not comparable. Not even in the same galaxy. This comment is just an excuse to do a hitjob on KDE donations. KDE is FOSS and doesn’t use your data to make money.
- ndiddy 11mo ago
  Yeah it's an especially bizarre remark because the pop-up isn't a nag, it literally only shows up once per year. It's also demonstrably worked to increase donations to KDE: https://pointieststick.com/2024/12/02/i-think-the-donation-notification-works/ https://pointieststick.com/2024/12/02/i-think-the-donation-n...
rpgbr 11mo ago

wohoef 11mo ago

But the web app is genuinely unusable. Often times takes 2+ minutes to properly load. This issue seems to be quite random though, not everyone has it.

pmontra 11mo ago
I force reloaded it now and it took only a few seconds. It's on CPU from 2014 on a 4G connection. However we are only two data points. Meta probably has a good knowledge of the distribution of the load times. If your spikes in load time are random it could be the connection, the amount of free RAM on your computer in that very moment, or maybe how well it is syncing with your phone. However I don't know how it handles that. It used to require an online phone but it seems that it can do without it now.

guilamu 11mo ago

It seems that anybody mentioning Telegram is downvoted, but I'm gonna try anyway just to add a simple fact: I just looked up the app in my task manager, while being used, the Telegram app is using 24 mb of ram. Telegram has its own faults and issues, but the native Windows app is incredibly good and fast.

saidinesh5 11mo ago

Out of curiosity, Does anyone know where exactly does the bloat of the electron come from in terms of ram usage, compared to a "native toolkit"? Because just parsing html/xml/some declarative ui description to create a scenegraph and pushing it to the GPU is something I'm sure even native frameworks like Qt do. Yet I can feel the latency in vs code vs. say sublime text. It's tempting to blame the huge js blobs trying to create an application abstraction over a document object model but i feel like there should be more to it than just that...

skydhash 11mo ago
It’s the extra API and layout rules. A lot of UI toolkit supports some version of xml for declarative UI programming. And they will create a widget tree to match it. But they’re far simpler than the DOM and therefore faster. Also think all the web subsystem that has been added over they years. Every electron app is bundling those in, even the inspector. It’s shipping a whole VM with your code. Containers have at least the decency to strip things down to the bare minimum, but no one is thinning chromium to only what they need.
- josephg 11mo ago
  Yep. Chrome contains: - HTML rendering - which is insanely complex to do efficiently for arbitrary web apps. - Video conferencing software - A graphics engine. Used for rendering web content, canvas2d, webgl, webgpu and video encoding & decoding for a bunch of formats. It also has a bunch of backends (eg CPU, Metal, Vulcan, etc) - JS, and every feature ever added to JS. - WASM compiler, optimizer & runtime - Memory manager, process isolation per tab, and all the plumbing to make that work. - The Inspector - which contains a debugger and most of an IDE for JS, WASM, CSS and HTML. - So much interop. Like chromecast support, http1, http2, quic, websockets, webtransport, webrtc, javascript remote debugger protocol, support for lots of pre-unicode text formats, DoH, webdriver, and on and on. - Extension support - Gamepad drivers, web bluetooth, webserial, midi support What am I missing? Probably lots of stuff. I have no idea how much each of these components contributes to browser bloat. But all up? Its a lot. Chrome is bigger than most complete operating systems from a decade or two ago. Browser vendors have to pick between fast, simple and fully featured. Chrome sacrifices simplicity every time.

andai 11mo ago

They can't afford to make a native one, huh? You know I heard something funny the other day, someone saying that now thanks to Claude Code, companies might go back to doing actual native support because the specialized knowledge and effort have both been basically automated now. Well, give it a few years!

pqb 11mo ago
From article: > WhatsApp for Windows was originally an Electron app, and it was eventually replaced with UWP after years of investment. Four years later, WhatsApp is going back to WebView2, abandoning the original WinUI/UWP native idea. > My understanding is that the recent layoffs at Mark Zuckerberg-headed Meta likely disbanded the entire team behind the native WhatsApp. I don’t see any other reason why Meta would abandon its native app for Windows. Meta will save costs by maintaining the web app codebase on Windows, but you’re going to hate the experience. Giving them more time won't change much if they have resigned from devs in order to save some money.

ale42 11mo ago

Just another reason not to use services based on closed protocols like WhatsApp. With open ones, you can just choose to use another client, even a terminal-based one that uses 2 MB of RAM if you like.

penguin_booze 11mo ago

This app culture is getting out of hand, on all platforms. Why can't people offer and use web browser directly? Isn't that sexy enough?

SwiftyBug 11mo ago
You can use WhatsApp on a browser. If you have Chromium installed, you can even "install" WhatsApp as a PWA.
- rpgbr 11mo ago
  Safari and Firefox as well. In any case, they are all resource hogs.

Yizahi 11mo ago

Heh, when I had to use Whatsapp on Windows for a while for work, it was one of the worst pieces of software I've seen, almost rivaling Skype v7-v8. It was not redesigned for desktop, it was silently crashing minimum twice a day every day, and that's under very light use. You are telling me it got even worse? :)

wiz21c 11mo ago

How many new desktop/laptop will be bought because RAM will be to small...

herunan 11mo ago

Complacency is the enemy of innovation. So many other chat clients are way better, yet WhatsApp is irreplaceable because it enjoys the competitive advantage of network effects.

InMice 11mo ago

Will it be like signal now... it's supposed to be a web app but it still needs to update every single time i sit down at my computer. And after every update there is not a single perceptible change.

emeril 11mo ago
it's not so terrible but yes, def not a true native app

Aerroon 11mo ago

I used to play a 3D MMO (Lineage 2) with hundreds of people on screen with spell effects, sounds etc on a computer with 512 MB of RAM. I was also running a mIRC client in rooms with hundreds to thousands of people at once. And I was able to do both at the same time. Now that computer can't even run 1v1 chat.

tonyhart7 11mo ago

this is why web wins, not because its the best but cost cheaper

nikolay 11mo ago

Well, Messenger and Facebook were the same, and they just phased out Messenger. One of the largest tech companies in the world cannot afford to hire a team of Windows native app developers! Shame on Meta!

redbell 11mo ago

I feel this trend is going to stick for the upcoming years! It's not just Meta, every big player there is adopting this mentality. Take Microsoft for instance, they have been pushing heavily what they called the New Outlook, which is basically a web-based client mirroring Outlook on the web (OWA) , packed into an EXE file (not sure if it is Electronized or not)! Then, they renamed the real native Outlook app as Classic Outlook to feel old-fashioned and outdated and as result, we ended up losing some core features that made Outlook, Outlook. We lose: COM Add-ins and VBA Macros, MAPI Support, Word as Email Editor, .PST File Support.. to name a few.. This would be probably one of the reasons contributing to the Collapse of Civilization (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317)

stilley2 11mo ago
Speaking of new outlook, has anyone else had search just...not work? I'll search for emails sent from myself, to myself (of which I know there are hundreds) and get 7 results. Same in the web app, but outlook classic works fine. Mind boggling
- rubenvanwyk 11mo ago
  Search on Outlook is horrendous. Our company bought Copilot just so people can start searching their e-mails.
  - stilley2 11mo ago
    I wonder if it's intentional and making everyone get copilot is the goal
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
- wobfan 11mo ago
  I mean they need the resources to switch from native, to UWP, to web, and then start over again in 2 years. How do you think should they manage to fix such a unnecessary thing like search in the meantime? But fear not! As we learnt from Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI, in early 2026, 100% of the code will be created by GenAI. Finally we can have native apps with working core-functionality. Can't wait for it!

outime 11mo ago

It's always the same discussions here whenever a company decides to use Electron or a similar solution. It's beyond tiring to see the same arguments being repeated. A company's goal is to make money by optimizing its resources. What benefits would Meta gain by maintaining native apps for WhatsApp across the three major operating systems? I can tell you: absolutely none, only negatives. Nobody except a negligible fraction of users would care about native performance or idle memory consumption. No one is going to switch to Signal or whatever the flavor-of-the-year messaging app is because of this. It would be a different story if WhatsApp were to lose a significant portion of its user base due to the app becoming unusable or extremely slow. But for the vast majority, this change will go unnoticed or frankly won't matter at all. So, expect most companies to continue adopting Electron-like apps (for the few that still have native apps anyway) for exactly the same reasons. Sorry to be blunt, but it's really tiresome to see these discussions going around in circles here. It’s pointless to keep debating this, it's not going to change. If one day a framework emerges that's comparable to Electron (or something similar) but requires fewer resources to develop against, I could see Meta and other companies considering it... provided the migration costs aren’t too high. But again, no end-user truly cares about this.

tacker2000 11mo ago

The problem is Whatsapp is now being used more and more in a professional context, even in Europe, and it's just not a pro software by any means. Searching for old messages is a pain, the web version is slow, there is now optimized overview or folders, etc... And now it seems that there is not even a benefit to installing the native vbersion, they will probably do the same for Mac also now.

rpgbr 11mo ago
I'm not defending WhatsApp by any means, but “professional” chat apps are equally bad — MS Teams, Slack etc. I long for a simple, stable chat app that doesn't change every other day. Maybe we should all go back to IRC.
Bayko 11mo ago
My Brazilian friend told me they use Whatsapp as a replacement for Slack since they don't want to pay for Slack As an Indian, I can confirm the same here for many companies

onion2k 11mo ago

It probably isn't really using that much but it will have reserved that much. V8 reserves memory in chunks of 256MB using virtualalloc with MEM_RESERVE on Windows (I think). It has to do that for each isolated process where an isolate is a tab, webview, worker, etc. A page that's built up from 4 isolated processes will reserve 1GB of RAM. That's only virtual alloc though, so other OS processes can take the memory if they really need it. There is essentially no way to tell if a JS app is using a lot of memory just by looking at what the process has reserved. There's loads of things that end up in that space - cached pages, cached compiled code, cached bitmaps of rendered pages, etc. The task monitor tells you what Chrome or Chromium (e.g. Electron) is doing, not what the web app is doing. There is a good argument to suggest Chromium is hogging more than it should. That's not really WhatsApp's fault though.

wobfan 11mo ago
> That's not really WhatsApp's fault though. I mean, you could argue that you're at fault when you're choosing a platform that literally eats your RAM. They're not at fault that the platform is shit. But they could have chosen another platform. Or, even better, just use the existing, most of the time perfectly working app, and optimize it. They had no resources to build the new features for every single platform that they offer native clients for? I could not imagine any other app for which this would be more hypocritical. Give me the iOS WhatsApp IPA from 2016, or even earlier, and the Windows Chromium Wrapper from 2018, and I will tell you neither me nor probably 98% percent of users will notice any difference in feature, let alone design.

cudgy 11mo ago

Me found hammer/react/shiny web framework … must use to make everything. No care about users.

hudo 11mo ago

What did we do wrong when simple chat app requires hundrets of megabytes of memory, or even gigabytes! Sure, its not just plain text but images and videos, but still...

Departed7405 11mo ago

As a Linux user, I am glad to see Whatshapp Web App isn't going away anytime so.

EionRobb 11mo ago

The Pidgin plugin for WhatsApp uses very little ram, if people are looking for low-ram alternatives. Although doesn't support calling. (disclaimer, I help out a little with that plugin, amongst others for Pidgin-

mostlyk 11mo ago
Aren't they against using the reverse engineered API and you posses a risk of ban?

postalrat 11mo ago

Want to know why web based UIs keep winning? It's simple: native UI APIs are terrible.

philjw 11mo ago

Just set-up a linux machine with Pidgin Messenger and XMPP last week like in the old days. It used to bundle MSN, ICQ, IRC and everything in one messenger - super resource efficient. Unfortulately I cannot reach many contacts that way these days but it showed me how inefficient applications became by using more abstraction layers. Same on my Mac - it uses almost 16GB of RAM in idle mode with some Tabs, VSCode and Figma open - How did we get here? edit: Just saw another comment mentioning there is a WhatsApp plugin for Pidgin. Awesome!

DANmode 11mo ago

…what did the other client max out at? At least look back at the color of the other grass!

mostlyk 11mo ago

We just wish https://github.com/tulir/whatsmeow https://github.com/tulir/whatsmeow didn't ban devs from using it. WhatsApp started off great and can be great again.

rs38 11mo ago

not sure how much resources it took from my WinARM Win11 as store app, but it's buggy in either release or beta since months as it loses network connectivity after some time...

nicr_22 11mo ago

There's a whole spectrum of options between super-fat React-in-Electron and expert-optimized platform-specific (perhaps GPU-rendered) apps. VS Code and Zed are close to opposite ends of this spectrum. - slim down to a more efficient, non-virtual-DOM web stack (e. g hypermedia) - move to a wrapper around native webview (Tauri) - use one of the excellent cross-platform frameworks (Flutter, or that new one just open sourced by Snap) For WhatsApp specifically, I don't understand why a company with the size and resources of Meta can't support native versions for Windows, Mac _and_ Linux. I think many people would accept non-feature-parity with the web/mobile versions, in exchange for a tight, reliable desktop messaging app...

Klonoar 11mo ago
> move to a wrapper around native webview (Tauri) WhatsApp now is using a native webview, at least they're using Webview2 on Windows.

Jotalea 11mo ago

to be honest, both the old web-based and the previous native apps were equally bad. I don't have too many memories of the old web-based app, but I remember perfectly fine that performing a simple contact search on a quite powerful laptop (Ryzen 7 3700U, 12GB RAM) took 5 entire seconds to type 1 letter, and it made the laptop feel like it was running on an Intel Pentium. meanwhile, the web-based version in the browser was nearly instant. I should try the new web-based app to perform benchmarks, but I think I'll just keep using the browser. I'll also mention, the "whatsapp web" website is extremely resource intensive, and in my laptop it makes the CPU usage ramp up to 100% very often, and using WhatsApp while having any other programs or even browser tabs open becomes unbelievably annoying. the desktop takes 700MB, the web browser takes 400MB, and WhatsApp web takes at least 1GB alone. this is on Arch Linux, with 4GB of DDR4 RAM.

lousken 11mo ago

peak entshittification moment for whatsapp, i am assuming this was vibecoded using llama 4?

HacklesRaised 11mo ago

I'm not saying Steve Jobs is turning in his grave, i'm saying it's like Cirque de Soleil in there. There are far too few people who truly advocate for the user, and it is this dereliction that has fuelled the race to the bottom. It's not a matter of native libraries versus x-platform solutions versus W3, it's about valuing UX over DX at EVERY TURN. It's about educating yourself as to the resource and performance consequence of the technologies you are advocating for.

ghtbircshotbe 11mo ago

So what is the best way to make your web app more efficient, if possible?

Fire-Dragon-DoL 11mo ago

I'll go against the tide and say: this is the reason why Linux desktop is more and more viable. I installed omarchy and realized that yes, all the apps I use except the terminal, are browser apps, so I don't need a desktop environment at all.

willywanker 10mo ago

What passes for a desktop app these anyway is just some variation of Electron - bundle the website along with a Chrome instance and serve up the resulting 300-400 MB bundle as a 'desktop' app. Who gives a crap about keyboard and mouse focused platform UI/UX conventions. Visually and functionally there's no difference between opening Whatsapp Web and installing this - both the earlier version and now.