Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper • Hacker News Board

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#151

Post by embedding-shape » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 9:26 AM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #143

ZeroConcerns wrote: post #39

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 c…

I just don't get it. Well ok, I kinda get it. I get the feeling nobody wants to build native apps anymore, or they don't or can't advocate for it strongly enough, or those advocates aren't in a position where they can make decisions. And from a manager's point of view it seems wasteful to develop the same feature across multiple platforms. And if you look at the numbers it does, but numbers-driven development has bee…

> numbers-driven development has been a huge issue for a long time now

Ever since UX and UIs started to be driven mainly by metrics and numbers, I felt something started going wrong already. Since then (the decades...), I've learned about "McNamara fallacy" which seems to perfectly fit a lot of "modern" software engineering and product management today:

> The McNamara fallacy (also known as the quantitative fallacy) [...] involves making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring all others. The reason given is often that these other observations cannot be proven.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#152

Post by chistev » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 9:27 AM UTC

mrtksn wrote: post #137

ZeroConcerns wrote: post #39

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 c…

Why just they don't give the Web UI code to their AI and tell it to convert the code to Windows native code without making mistakes?

Stop it lol

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#153

Post by InsideOutSanta » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 9:29 AM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #37

jeisc wrote: post #29

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

Unfortunately I don't think a vibe-coded native app would be that much better either.

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."

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#154

Post by psychoslave » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 9:30 AM UTC

brap wrote: post #92

ZeroConcerns wrote: post #39

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 c…

Yeah, I kinda agree with that reluctantly. As much as I like super snappy and efficient native apps, we just gotta accept that no sane company is going to invest significant resources in something that isn’t used 99%+ of the time. WhatsApp (and the world) is almost exclusively mobile + web. So it’s either feature lag, or something like this. And these days most users won’t even feel the 1GB waste. I think we’re not f…

> And honestly when things are cheap, who cares.

It depends what metrics are considered. We can’t continue to transform earth into a wasteland eternally just because in the narrow window it takes as reference a system disconnect reward from long terms effects.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#155

Post by sunaookami » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 9:31 AM UTC

philippta wrote: post #69

ZeroConcerns wrote: post #39

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 c…

Your reasoning seems counter intuitive as back in 2012 Facebook rewrote their HTML5 based app to native iOS code, optimized for performance, and knowingly took the feature parity hit. https://engineering.fb.com/2014/10/31/ios/making-news-feed-n...

Reminds me of this 2013 story where they moved to native Java for Android and hit limits with e.g. too many methods and instead of refactoring or just not bloating their app they hacked some internals of the Davlik VM while it's running during app install: https://engineering.fb.com/2013/03/04/android/under-the-hood...

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#156

Post by modo_mario » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 9:32 AM UTC

sunaookami wrote: post #150

calmingsolitude wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is because many of the "native" windows components like the start menu are written in react native.

This is wrong. The "recommended" section of the start menu is written with React Native but compiled to native XAML and not running web technologies. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44125217

Wait.....why develop that small part so differently than the rest?

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#157

Post by saidinesh5 » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 9:33 AM UTC

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...

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#158

Post by blitzar » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 9:33 AM UTC

herbst wrote: post #129

blitzar wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well ... when a mummy and a daddy love each other very much

... You'll end up being forced into WhatsApp groups? Sounds dangerous

You also end up handling 10x more faeces and vomit than you have seen in your existence to date ... while whatsapp is more gross, you handle it the same way you handle diarrhea - you hold your nose and deal with it.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#159

Post by brap » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 9:34 AM UTC

hxorr wrote: post #149

brap wrote: post #97

Earlier 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 Have you checked RAM prices this week?

Cheap in the sense that most target users don’t have to worry about allocating it

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#160

Post by InsideOutSanta » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 9:36 AM UTC

herbst wrote: post #139

johnisgood wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Where I live, WhatsApp is the standard. 100% of people have it installed, minus some hermits who have never heard of the Internet.

My parents know how to use WhatsApp and have it installed. My sister and her family, too. My friends, their friends, the scammer trying to explain to me how to access the crypto I apparently lost track of on their platform, my former coworkers, my current coworkers, the people I interact with for my freelance work, the government's road safety alerts, my ex-girlfriend who still has a bunch of my clothes, my neighborhthey areood group informing me when I need to put out the trash-they're all on WhatsApp.

It's the network effect. Even to get my family group on Signal, I'd have to get twenty people to install Signal, probably visit some of them to help them with the setup, do it again every time they switch phones, and so on. And they'd probably still default to WhatsApp because that's what they know.