I've just tried it, it works well. Barring the delay on opening, and a small delay on resizing, it seems like a native app on Elementary OS. Credit to WhatsApp

I've just tried it, it works well. Barring the delay on opening, and a small delay on resizing, it seems like a native app on Elementary OS. Credit to WhatsApp for building an excellent webapp, and credit to the author for wrapping everything up to tie in with the desktop. I would say there's definitely a benefit to have it as a separate hybrid app, rather than just loading the web-page. You can launch it directly, set it to run at start-up if you want, have a meaningful dock icon, notifications, etc. Clearly, in general you'd prefer a native application, but this is definitely useful.