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> 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.
by eviks 1y 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 1y agoHow 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 1y agoIt’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 1y agoI’m pretending to myself this has largely got so many upvotes from the accused persons colleagues :-D
- phito 1y agoFrom 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 1y agoNobody ever got promo for not rewriting the app
- qcnguy 1y agoYou'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.