Meta is phasing out its native WhatsApp app on a Windows laptop – Techloy

Photo by Oberon Copeland @veryinformed.com / Unsplash While many tech companies are working to deepen platform integration and offer smoother native experiences, especially for widely used systems like Windows 11, Meta seems to be heading in the opposite direction. In a surprising move, the company is rolling back WhatsApp’s native Windows app in favour of a web-based wrapper. It’s the kind of change that sounds harmless on paper, but for long-time desktop users, it’s hard not to see it as a downgrade. Windows 11 is now the most used version of the Windows operating system globally Nearly four years after its launch, Windows 11 is no longer the backup plan—it’s the primary operating system running on Windows laptops. Techloy Oluwaseun Bamisile The update, now live in beta, replaces the native WinUI version with a Chromium-based version using Microsoft’s Edge WebView2 technology. That essentially means WhatsApp for Windows is now just a glorified version of web.whatsapp.com, running inside a desktop shell. Meta says this change helps streamline development by letting the company maintain a single codebase across platforms. And to be fair, it likely does. Releasing new features becomes faster, and support across Windows, macOS, and the web is more uniform.
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