Meta drops support for native WhatsApp for Windows.

💬 Topics:
- Software development in 2025;
- Is code quality still important?
- Coding trends;
- The future of native app development.

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Meta replaced WhatsApp's native Windows app with a web-based version that consumes 1-3 GB of RAM compared to the previous 20-100 MB. This shift reflects a broader industry trend where companies prioritize cross-platform web solutions over native development, despite significant performance degradation. The move signals that desktop platforms are becoming afterthoughts, software quality is declining in favor of development speed and cost reduction, and the industry is normalizing poor performance as hardware capabilities increase.

Good software doesn't matter anymore...

On the one hand, I think it’s a colossal waste of money and valuable talent for businesses to have to reimplement the same apps for web, for iOS, for Android, for media streamers, for smart TVs, etc. etc.
On the other hand, THREE F*CKING GIGS OF RAM FOR A CHAT APP?
Honestly, I feels like we would all forgive WhatsApp, VS Code, Slack, Discord, etc. for dropping native development if their web wrappers weren’t so ludicrously memory intensive. If someone made an Electron alternative with a really small memory footprint that would make everybody happy.
So… anyone up for it?

<blockquote>
and the industry is normalizing poor performance as hardware capabilities increase
</blockquote>
This is not new. It has been like that for at least the last 30 years.

Did someone mention Outlook (new)?

but they already have a pwa too? works just fine without eating all your ram

It’s interesting how JavaScript started out as an add-on for Netscape and is now poised to replace all other programming languages.