WhatsApp for Windows

“often freezes while I'm trying to type a message, often losing much of what I type”

“The desktop app also steals Copy/Paste shortcuts and probably keylogs.”

“open 4 programs that use Electron (Discord, Spotify, VSCode, WhatsApp desktop)”

“It is so disingenuous to mention the whatsapp electron client and not pretend its a slow turd”

“It could chat fine but refused to join calls, displaying an error”

“Meanwhile Zoom, Teams, Webex, and others allow you to join any call without a mic or camera.”

“I was being generous and assuming the chat app "only" used 1GB of ram.”

“Visually and functionally there's no difference between opening Whatsapp Web and installing this”

“def not a true native app”

“both the old web-based and the previous native apps were equally bad”

“In this case, it's a skill issue to ship low quality software which is what whoever that team at Meta just did”

“I don't understand why a company with the size and resources of Meta can't support native versions for Windows, Mac and Linux.”

“it's buggy in either release or beta since months as it loses network connectivity after some time”

“Or, even better, just use the existing, most of the time perfectly working app, and optimize it.”

“Sounds like the all powerful mighty Meta didn't have capable engineering working on that app.”

“The real explanation is a level of uncaring incompetence that can only be sustained in large organizations.”

“it was silently crashing minimum twice a day every day, and that's under very light use”

“Shoving the complexity and cost to users' is being inconsiderate.”

“But the web app is genuinely unusable. Often times takes 2+ minutes to properly load.”

“Meta would have been better off doing like Telegram and just using Qt.”

“they accept a solution that performs completely far worse in both runtime and space complexity”

“aside from restarting when the browser updates or other pedantry, it does”

“I wish they used an SDK and published that, so we could build better clients.”

“the desktop app is considerably faster and more responsive.”

“Memory, while I feel that a gigabyte is way to much for what is essentially a chat app, it is virtual memory, so it's not as problematic as I'd like it to be.”

“it was much slower (like a minute or two) to “connect” after opening the window compared to before”

“If is anything like the WhatsApp Web, "works" might be optimistic choice of word.”

“the old native windows app was /awful/”

“a more lightweight experience at 1/10th the RAM consumption”

“The experience of using a native app is far superior.”

“how does it gobble 100MB when idle? Are the protocols that complex?”

“very good for quickly attaching pictures and documents, or receiving them”

“by the time the resulting GPU worker process balloons up to 400MB, that pretty much goes out of the window”

“The Ram used here is not for accelerating the user experience.”

“when WhatsApp went from an Electron app to a native windows app it got decisively worse”

“I really don't understand why WhatsApp would need app especially with the state mentioned here”

“Don't they waste more resources vs. creating / fixing the gaps in the native app?”

“what makes this decision truly baffling is that they already had a UWP app”

“I’ve has it use 3-4 Gb when I had the channel with cat photos displayed for weeks.”

“from a security and privacy standpoint there are only upsides”