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Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

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Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#181

Post by myaccountonhn »

iamcalledrob wrote: post #126

As 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…

It's worth wondering why we need so many changes done to a chat app. Everything they introduce to this app just makes it worse. I just want to have something where I can chat and call my friends with no frills.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#182

Post by skydhash »

saidinesh5 wrote: post #157

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…

It’s the extra API and layout rules. A lot of UI toolkit supports some version of xml for declarative UI programming. And they will create a widget tree to match it. But they’re far simpler than the DOM and therefore faster.

Also think all the web subsystem that has been added over they years. Every electron app is bundling those in, even the inspector. It’s shipping a whole VM with your code. Containers have at least the decency to strip things down to the bare minimum, but no one is thinning chromium to only what they need.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#183

Post by josephg »

cm2187 wrote: post #166
pta2002 wrote: post #59

I do want to point out, as someone who uses the WhatsApp app (to me, it’s slightly more convenient than the web version) that the old native windows app was /awful/. It looked native enough, but it just didn’t work. For as long as I remember it would randomly stop accepting input into the text field and I’d have to restart the app, and this was insanely frequent. Typing dead keys was also randomly broken with accents…

I see the same bugs. It looks like after ICQ, writing a chat app has become an impossible computer science problem (skype, teams, whatsapp,…). How did that ancient civilisation from the 90s managed to build a functional chat app? The know how is lost to times.

The more time passes, the more impressed I am with mIRC. It was an incredibly fully featured chat client - with hundreds of features, and its own scripting language for more advanced use. All that in a 4mb download. It probably still works great, to this day.

As a teenager, I thought we'd get better at making software over time. Not worse.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#184

Post by fransje26 »

shevy-java wrote: post #128

Software 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 t…

> https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde...

That was.. ..an interesting read. The seemingly perpetual need of defaulting back to greed and authoritarianism never ceases to amaze me.

I was thinking about switching back to KDE. Well, maybe not after all. Cheerio, as they say.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#185

Post by TiredOfLife »

thw_9a83c wrote: post #178
sirwhinesalot wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

VS Code is Electron not WebView2

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#186

Post by baq »

myaccountonhn wrote: post #181
iamcalledrob wrote: post #126

As 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…

It's worth wondering why we need so many changes done to a chat app. Everything they introduce to this app just makes it worse. I just want to have something where I can chat and call my friends with no frills.

you kinda answered yourself and perhaps suggested the answer, but it's worth saying out loud: they don't want whatsapp to be a chat app. they want it to be the next facebook and they want to smuggle it in a chat app container. if it seems like if it starts working out, I'll be buying Meta stock with disgust.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#187

Post by skydhash »

brap wrote: post #159
hxorr wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Are you sure? Or do you think users only run one app on their desktop?

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#188

Post by jack_tripper »

sirwhinesalot wrote: post #138
iamcalledrob wrote: post #126

As 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…

> Microsoft provided APIs are a disaster that keeps getting rewritten every half decade

What a wrong and misleading statement.

Not they aren't. Otherwise Winamp 2.95 from 2003 wouldn't flawlessly work on my Windows 11 install 23 years later. Same with my Unreal Tournament 99 installation that I just copied over via a CD left from my Windows 98 PC.

As long as you haven't used any undocumented APIs or made your app hack its way into the OS via hooks like some games did back then for performance optimizations or some anti-piracy SW did, then most Windows apps from over 20+ years ago will still work today and it's also why WINE works so well to get Windows app working on Linux, is precisely because Microsoft HASN'T changed the APIs.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#189

Post by TiredOfLife »

RossBencina wrote: post #176
sirwhinesalot wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are talking about UI. Winforms (abandoned), WPF (abandoned), UWP (abandoned), MAUI.

Windows itself was always using their own custom stuff and not any of those. The closest thing to an established framework in Windows is react native that is sprinkled here and there. And QT that OneDrive uses

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#190

Post by 72deluxe »

iamcalledrob wrote: post #126

As 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…

I am baffled by this. I wrote a cross-platform GUI for an audio signal processor in wxWidgets that rendered all of its own widgets (own Draw calls, for faders, graphic EQ, compressors, drag/drop linking of nodes for a layout, knobs, meters/scopes) and incorporated Horde3D as a 3D rendering of the arena. It ran on macOS and Windows. Another chap handled the network control code that included joining multicast groups to discover the devices, and the device itself had a series of DSPs on it with an ARM processor for drawing on the LCD and handling the network stack and interfacing between the DSP and inputs from the network. That's 2 people.

So you're saying that it is impossible for a large company to somehow use native toolkits to draw text bubbles and emojis?? Video and audio is another matter, but MSN Messenger managed 75% of this decades ago, natively.

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