This app culture is getting out of hand, on all platforms. Why can't people offer and use web browser directly? Isn't that sexy enough?
Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
171–180 of 402 posts
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#172I 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.
To be fair, the resolution and bitrate were worse, and it wasn't end to end encrypted. I agree, though, that we've regressed.
Wasn't early skype end-to-end encrypted?
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#173They can't afford to make a native one, huh? You know I heard something funny the other day, someone saying that now thanks to Claude Code, companies might go back to doing actual native support because the specialized knowledge and effort have both been basically automated now. Well, give it a few years!
From article:
> WhatsApp for Windows was originally an Electron app, and it was eventually replaced with UWP after years of investment. Four years later, WhatsApp is going back to WebView2, abandoning the original WinUI/UWP native idea.
> My understanding is that the recent layoffs at Mark Zuckerberg-headed Meta likely disbanded the entire team behind the native WhatsApp. I don’t see any other reason why Meta would abandon its native app for Windows. Meta will save costs by maintaining the web app codebase on Windows, but you’re going to hate the experience.
Giving them more time won't change much if they have resigned from devs in order to save some money.
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Classic case of shipping the org chart
(in case anyone needs a reminder of Microsoft's org chart: https://www.globalnerdy.com/2011/07/03/org-charts-of-the-big...)
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is because many of the "native" windows components like the start menu are written in react native.
Dear God, I hate the way the Windows 11 Start Menu takes slightly too long to open - long enough that I often accidentally close it again. You can actually watch CPU usage increase if you toggle it.
> You can actually watch CPU usage increase if you toggle it.
Not any more, I kept windows 11 around for gaming but I binned the partition, how they managed to make a 7950X3D/7900XTX feel "clunky" is astounding given that I live in KDE which has a reputation for been a "heavy" DE and yet it it feels instantaneously fast in every dimension compared to windows 11.
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#176As 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 exp…
You're absolutely right that the issue is the coordination cost. It's not about the number of resources but just the fact that you need those resources to coordinate, slowing everything down. Not a problem in waterfall, since you can set the targets beforehand and just have the teams work in parallel. In an "Agile" setting though (not the manifesto version, the current practice version)? It's a huge mess. So then the…
> The Microsoft provided APIs are a disaster that keeps getting rewritten every half decade, and even Microsoft barely uses them.
What are you talking about? The Windows APIs have been stable for at least 20 years.
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#177Well, 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 keep fighting with devs that want to use web-everything. Luckily for me, i have the ultimate power so i can just say "Firefox doesn't support that. I don't use chrome. period." But lately i had to start saying Safari doesn't support that so we would lose all iphones, or we can start investigate after we have a working solution. God damn react.
It’s such a mess isn’t it.
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#178As 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 exp…
You're absolutely right that the issue is the coordination cost. It's not about the number of resources but just the fact that you need those resources to coordinate, slowing everything down. Not a problem in waterfall, since you can set the targets beforehand and just have the teams work in parallel. In an "Agile" setting though (not the manifesto version, the current practice version)? It's a huge mess. So then the…
> Meta would have been better off doing like Telegram and just using Qt.
Qt would certainly be the better choice. However, since Meta already has a web version of the WhatsApp client, the WebView2 path was an easy and inexpensive option. After all, MS itself paved the way with Teams, Visual Studio Code, and Outlook.
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#179Heh, when I had to use Whatsapp on Windows for a while for work, it was one of the worst pieces of software I've seen, almost rivaling Skype v7-v8. It was not redesigned for desktop, it was silently crashing minimum twice a day every day, and that's under very light use. You are telling me it got even worse? :)
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#180As 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 exp…
> nonlinearly Calling it nonlinear paints some horrible exponential picture. It's just squared (all to all communication). We deal with squared problems all the time (that's literally what distributed consensus is all about.....)
Practically it’s not squared because people randomly just ignore you (or even worse, maliciously comply), and tracking down all the people doing those things makes it more like exponential.
Eventually, the effort required to actually manage doing the thing is at least as large/larger than just doing it - ex: every large organization.