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).
Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
121–130 of 402 posts
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#122Well, 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 c…
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…
We could call it Flash. Or Java Applets.
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#123Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#124This makes PWAs more and more attractive to me.
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> RAM is cheap My time isn't
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.
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#126As 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.
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#127I 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.
> 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 JS and the web has seen performance improvements. They lead to more ads being served and more code being released faster to users.
There's a lot of advanced home insulation out there. In theory, buying expensive insulation is much better than making energy cheaper, because you only pay for the insulation once, and then save money indefinitely from it. But most people don't re-insulate their homes (or try to find cold-spots, seal leaks, etc). Despite the fact that we have more efficient insulation, it hasn't driven up demand for insulation. Why is this? The idea that efficiency == increased demand is a logical idea. But humans aren't logical.
We have more efficient hardware, so we should be seeing hardware everywhere. But actually we all use the same amount of hardware we did 20 years ago. We all have a desktop, a laptop, a smartphone, a modem, hell even a computer watch, like we did 20 years ago. But they're more efficient now.
Where we do see more hardware now, is in pre-existing appliances, like fridges, TVs. And why is there more hardware? Sometimes it's just a remote control ("turn off TV"). But more often, the increase in adoption follows a specific motive: like figuring out that they could sell ads or subscriptions through it. And the hardware itself is not what's making the ads work: it's the software, that collects the information, feeds it to companies over networks, lets them data-mine it and sell it continuously. Both of these are just serving a human interest to make more money through the creative use of surveillance and marketing. And honestly, most of this could've been done with hardware and software 20 years ago. But because it's in vogue now, we see more of the hardware and software now.
We are comforted by coming up with an explanation that makes logical sense, like the paradox. But the paradox applies most when it coincides with an unrelated human interest. What motivates us is not A+B=C, but a combination of different calculations that sometimes involve A and B, and incidentally add up to C.
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#128Software 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... it always comes down to greed; Meta also is very greedy, why do they have spy-apps that eat so much RAM when idle?).
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#129Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#130I 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.
> 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 JS and the web has seen performance improvements. They lead to more ads being served and more code being released faster to users.
> 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
Completely wrong an irrelevant analogy!
I see where you went sideways, you confused trigger with consequence completely. Here the efficiency for the very same application got very, very very, increadibly hugely, galactically worse. Not better. The premise of the linked article is that the same application gets more efficient. Then comes the increased use of the affected resource. Here the same application went shit, complete shit, concerning efficiency, and had no effect on memory manufacture and prices, WhatsApp is not that significant in computing.
Probably a better analogy was that if technological and tigtly related economical advances raise the availability of resources (here memory, CPU) then things go dumb. If something then the generalized (from time to any resources) Parkinson's law is relevant here: increasing available resources beyond reasonable leading to waste and bad quality outcomes, overcomplication.