Meta (recently rebranded as Meta AI) quietly announced that WhatsApp will be abandoning UWP (WinUI) on Windows 11 and falling back to a Chromium-based container. This means WhatsApp is back to what it was a few years ago. Since web.whatsapp.com has always been ahead of the curve in Windows app development, it does have some new features, but is slower and takes up more memory.
It's one thing if independent developers choose web apps because they can't afford to maintain a code base for all platforms, but it's really sad when a trillion-dollar company like Meta isn't willing to provide and maintain native apps for Windows 11, which has 1.4 billion active PCs every month.
An update is coming to WhatsApp Beta soon. It replaces the native app with WebView-based WhatsApp. The experience is the same as what you see on web.whatsapp.com. The user interface is almost identical, but there are some significant differences, chief among them (and my biggest pet peeve) being slow performance.
How do you know WhatsApp for Windows 11 is a WebView?
New WebView2 WhatsApp
When you use Task Manager or other tools such as Process Hacker, you will notice several child processes running under WhatsApp. The process is called WebView2, which is developed by Microsoft and is the underlying engine of the Chromium-based Edge browser.
The new version of WhatsApp is just a desktop container that can call web code (HTML, JavaScript, CSS) and then be rendered by WebView2, just like the page in Edge. If you have a few minutes to spare, just open Microsoft Edge's built-in Task Manager. You'll find auxiliary tools such as GPU processes, managers, and utilities.
These assistants now provide support for WhatsApp on Windows 11 as well. All these assistants handle different jobs, such as graphics, networking, or storage.
Native/legacy WhatsApp app
For comparison, see the screenshot above. The old Windows 10 version of WhatsApp was a pure UWP/WinUI app with only one child process, its own runtime. This type of application uses the system's own UI toolkit and mainly runs in a lightweight process.
In our tests, Windows Latest found that the new version of WhatsApp uses about 30% more memory than the existing native app.
Ironically, WhatsApp's support documentation agrees with our thoughts on the move. As Meta puts it, native apps "offer greater performance and reliability" and come with a host of benefits, including a better user experience for notifications, calling, screen sharing, a better user experience, and many more.
Why is Meta’s WhatsApp ditching UWP/WinUI (native code) for WebView Chromium? Because moving to WebView2 made everything easier for Meta, as they now only have to maintain one codebase that can run anywhere. This also means that WhatsApp will now be a resource hog like Chrome.
WhatsApp UWP used to be one of the best apps on Windows 11, but now it has been replaced by web.whatsapp.com and WebView.
Senior Microsoft leaders, including current Amazon employee Panos Panay, also praised WhatsApp's WinUI app. Unlike most native “modern” Windows apps that use WebView for a feature, WhatsApp for Windows 11 is completely native.
The Windows version of WhatsApp has basically the same functionality as the Android and iOS versions. Almost all features are integrated into the native desktop app, and there have been rare instances where the Windows version added features before the Android version.
It's all over and we're back to square one. A frustrating, resource-hungry, boring web wrapper.