Complacency is the enemy of innovation. So many other chat clients are way better, yet WhatsApp is irreplaceable because it enjoys the competitive advantage of network effects.
Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
201–210 of 402 posts
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why buy stock of something you don't like? Surely you can find other profitable investment options that also then don't support the thing you don't like?
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#203I 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.
early ICQ didn't have to support Unicode IMEs either...
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#204How many new desktop/laptop will be bought because RAM will be to small...
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#205I 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.
> How did that ancient civilisation from the 90s managed to build a functional chat app?
By only accepting ANSI input, not encrypting any messages, and not bothering to protect users' from remote attacks.
Facebooks's GUI stack for WhatsApp may be rather buggy but on a technical level there's a lot more going on than back in the days of unencrypted TCP connections over plaintext protocols.
Meanwhile, Telegram has an excellent desktop app (despite their terrible protocol), so it's not like the knowledge was lost either.
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#206Well, 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…
If they hadn’t fumbled the UI framework, and to a lesser extent the language design, you’re effectively describing .Net’s original role in the MS ecosystem and their play for web dominance.
JIT compiling, native graphics, quick and easy online deployment into sandboxes, support for desktop standards like keypresses, etc.
It feels like the web ate up the windows desktop experience instead of that experience spreading cross-platform and dominating.
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
If they want fungible engineers, yes. They don’t want to pay extra for an expert in wxWidgets and Horde3D. They don’t want to wait while that expert’s replacement comes up to speed on Horde3D. They don’t even want to wait for any existing engineers to learn these two technologies. They know web, they can manage web - web is “less risky.”
I too did not know anything about Horde3D when I found it and incorporated it.
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#208> 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 start…
Nobody ever got promo for not rewriting the app
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#209Erm, so why wouldn’t I just use WhatsApp as a PWA? I wouldn’t even need to waste the disk space for yet another browser runtime.
When you're using WebView2, it uses Windows' built-in browser runtime (Chromium/Edge). Electron ships a browser runtime, but the article notes they're using WebView2.
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
... You'll end up being forced into WhatsApp groups? Sounds dangerous
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.
I can report that Matrix/Element is still absolutely terrible, and not just the search.