WhatsApp on Windows 11 has just got a ‘major’ upgrade, and you’re probably going to hate it because it simply loads web.whatsapp.com in a WebView2 container. This means WhatsApp on Windows 11 is cooked, and it’s back to being absolute garbage in terms of performance.
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.
An app can use a lot of memory, and it does not necessarily mean it’s a performance nightmare, but the issue with the new WhatsApp is that it feels sluggish. You’re going to notice sluggish performance, long loading time, and other performance issues when browsing different conversations.
We also noticed that it does not work well with Windows notifications. It also struggles with Windows 11’s Do Not Disturb mode or Active Hours. And there are delayed notifications problems as well.
Mayank Parmar
While reading about this update I initially doubted it was as bad as people feared, since people do tend to exaggerate things online for dramatic purposes. But after the update reached one of my devices, I get what everyone was complaining about, and I feel compelled to join in!
This new WhatsApp WebView app on Windows is simply atrocious in terms of performance. It’s slow to start up, then it takes its sweet time loading recent messages, because apparently background sync is no longer a thing it can do, which makes it feel even slower. Even after this delay to supposedly load chats, when you first click on a conversation it spends another couple of seconds loading those messages – and doing a bad job at it, as it sometimes fails to load random messages in some threads.
The interface is lagging, bloated, and oddly confusing, because the buttons seem to have changed from the native app. I know they’re supposed to replicate the design of the smartphone apps, but it took me days to realize that the button on the left of the chat box opens the emoji selector; on mobile I always use the emoji button on the keyboard, to keep the experience consistent across apps.
On top of that, probably because of the lack of background sync, if you close the app, it doesn’t even send notifications for messages as they come in! The new app defaults to minimizing to the system tray (and starting up with the OS) and thus running all the time to keep polling for messages, but that’s terribly inefficient – not to mention I don’t trust Meta with constantly running apps on my computer. Needless to say, the old native version could handle notifications just fine without hogging up your memory. The ultimate Big Tech enshittification: a messaging app without notifications…
Ironically, around the same time at the beginning of November, WhatsApp launched its first Apple Watch app – native of course. Hard to argue that there was more consumer demand for a Watch app than a native Windows app – people owning Apple Watches are deeper into Apple’s ecosystem, therefore more likely to favor iMessage; also iPhones are much more popular in the US, where WhatsApp hasn’t gained much of a foothold. Development costs aside – which are more an issue of corporate willingness than actual costs, especially for a company with Meta’s resources – I suspect this is a situation where developers are prioritizing the platforms that they themselves use regularly (so Macs over Windows PCs) over what their customer base is using.
As things stand, I will probably uninstall this sorry excuse for an app altogether. While they’re not ideal, there are some alternatives: the web version of WhatsApp feels snappier and loads messages quicker on first load – maybe because Edge is better optimized for Windows that the container used by the app. You can also install the site as an app from Edge if you prefer having WhatsApp in its own window outside of the browser.
If you’re using Microsoft’s Phone Link with an Android device you can also access the Android WhatsApp app on your desktop to read and send messages. Although a bit slow, it’s a workable solution for text messages; sending images and screenshots is trickier, because you can’t simply paste screenshots from your desktop in the mobile app, like you can with the native and web apps. It makes sense once you think about it, because with Phone Link you’re accessing your phone remotely, so you can send media stored on the phone, but not on the desktop.
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