Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper that uses 1 GB RAM when idle
10 comments
·November 13, 2025whatsupdog
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.
Barrin92
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.
plotti
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.
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dangus
People use WhatsApp on the computer? From the Windows Store of all places?
Must 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.
Dylan16807
> 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.
Some of that memory isn't going to be touched again, and will eventually be moved to swap, but it still pushed things out of RAM to be there and is a troublemaker.
The rest of that memory will be needed again, so if it gets swapped out it'll lag badly when you switch back to the program.
Either way 99% of programs are not doing any kind of intelligent use of spare memory. If you see them doing something that looks wasteful, that's because they're being wasteful.
The one thing to remember is that at the OS level, disk cache pretty much qualifies as free memory. But that's unrelated to this issue.
1over137
> RAM is not really something you explicitly ration.
I guess this modern attitude is how we are where we are.
RAM is absolutely a scarce precious resource that we optimize for. At least we used to, and some of us still do.
snthpy
I also use it a lot but the app has always been terrible. I forget exactly what the problems are but I think the text input becomes unresponsive and it becomes unusable.
Bolwin
I use it extensively. For years Whatsapp had a lovely native windows app and now they're replacing it with this horrible bloated thing
I don't mind as long as I can make calls from the app. The call feature isn't available on Linux/Web app unfortunately.