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Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

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11–20 of 402 posts

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#11
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.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#12

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.

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.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#13
post #10

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.

You mean like Matrix or XMPP? They just aren't as ubiquitous as email unfortunately.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#14

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.

What do you put on the cleaned phone?

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#16
> 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

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#17
post #2

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.

> 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.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#18
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.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#19
post #12

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.

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]

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#20
post #14

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.

What do you put on the cleaned phone?

Entering/Leaving is the biggest problem with US travel and hardware. In the time inbetween you can just use it like a normal phone.
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