For someone who travels a lot, I would love to have the ability to have WhatsApp on multiple phones (like telegram). I have a separate phone for traveling to US/Canada, which I usually wipe clean before crossing. It's really cumbersome to backup/restore Whatsapp messages from one phone to another. Or I just lose the messages that I send/receive while traveling.
It's a piece of shit and they know they can get away with it. Omg why are there no open protocols on Instant messengIng like email. Europe should enforce it.
I can understand (although I'd still think it's a bad idea) going with a web app wrapper if you're starting out that way, but what makes this decision truly baffling is that they already had a UWP app.
Meta makes more money than god and there's over a billion WhatsApp users. It's not like this thing is Blender or a AAA game, it's a chat frontend. Maintaining it has to be a rounding error in the budget.
> 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 startup prototype app that can flop and the effort would be wasted
If most Windows users are using WhatsApp web on Microsoft Edge then making it an app like this saves them a huge chunk of effort in maintaining two apps (WhatsApp web and a separate Windows app)
I 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.
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 can actually implement stuff like this in a performant and offline-sensitive way.
But, yeah, by the time the resulting GPU worker process balloons up to 400MB, that pretty much goes out of the window. I'm actually sort-of impressed, in that I have no idea how I would even make that happen! But that's why I don't work at a powerhouse like Meta, I guess...
> You’d realise how bad this is when I tell you the benchmarks for the native WhatsApp for comparison. I tested the old/native WhatsApp, and it uses just 190MB most of the time, dropping to less than 100MB when it’s completely idle. At worst, it would reach 300MB, which can happen only when the chat is really active.
Well sounds like a lot of useless work was being done then, how does it gobble 100MB when idle? Are the protocols that complex?
Just do as I do and open web.whatsapp.com in your favorite browser
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 not coming through, which is really annoying if you’re trying to sound professional on a language that requires them.
The new electron app does take more resources, but at the very least it works.
Ah yes the high quality engineering FB is famous for. Remember when their mobile app was snooping on users (probably microphone but who knows what else) some years ago so it was 'mysteriously' draining the battery when not used? Either unacceptable level of crap engineering consistently across quite a few updates from such a big wealthy company or... worse. I don't believe engineers there would be so bad consistently, so to me its pretty clear given overall behavior of company and its owner.
I was very happy with that situation - it was the last and good enough reason to uninstall all FB-related apps from phone, and never looked back. That company (and not only that) is a cancer to whole society, as per design.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 71.2 ms ] threadMust be a tiny percentage, which is why this version is now a basic web wrapper now.
Anyway, I’d remind everyone that “using” RAM doesn’t mean “would not function with less RAM.”
Many applications just use a lot if it’s available.
RAM is not really something you explicitly ration.
Meta makes more money than god and there's over a billion WhatsApp users. It's not like this thing is Blender or a AAA game, it's a chat frontend. Maintaining it has to be a rounding error in the budget.
I wonder if they avoided that so they could use Electron and target MacOS / Linux too
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 startup prototype app that can flop and the effort would be wasted
Yet, I really don't understand why WhatsApp would need app especially with the state mentioned here (which is a basic wrapper)
There are no calls in the web app, but modern web stack is more than enough to provide all the real functionality needed for it.
Whatsapp screams antitrust. If you look in the dictionary for antitrust, you see Whatsapp
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
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 can actually implement stuff like this in a performant and offline-sensitive way.
But, yeah, by the time the resulting GPU worker process balloons up to 400MB, that pretty much goes out of the window. I'm actually sort-of impressed, in that I have no idea how I would even make that happen! But that's why I don't work at a powerhouse like Meta, I guess...
No 1 GB or installation needed
Why is the desktop app even a thing?
Well sounds like a lot of useless work was being done then, how does it gobble 100MB when idle? Are the protocols that complex?
Just do as I do and open web.whatsapp.com in your favorite browser
Another example of WinUI anemic state.
The new electron app does take more resources, but at the very least it works.
I was very happy with that situation - it was the last and good enough reason to uninstall all FB-related apps from phone, and never looked back. That company (and not only that) is a cancer to whole society, as per design.