WhatsApp for Windows 11 is switching back to Chromium web wrapper from UWP/native

Meta (more lately Meta AI) has quietly announced that WhatsApp is ditching UWP (WinUI) for a Chromium-based container on Windows 11. This means WhatsApp is back to how it was a few years ago. It does have a couple of new features because web.whatsapp.com was always ahead of Windows app development, but it’s slower and uses more RAM. It’s one thing if an indie developer opts for web apps because they cannot afford to maintain the codebase across all platforms, but it’s actually sad when a trillion-dollar company like Meta is not willing to ship and maintain a native app for Windows 11, which has 1.4 billion monthly active PCs. As first spotted by Windows Latest, there’s a new update rolling out for WhatsApp Beta. It replaces the native app with a WebView-based WhatsApp. It’s the same experience you’ll find on web.whatsapp.com. The UI is almost identical, but there are several notable differences, and the primary (the one I hate) is slow performance. How do you know WhatsApp for Windows 11 is a WebView? New WebView2 WhatsApp / Image Courtesy: WindowsLatest.com When you use Task Manager or another tool like Process Hacker, you’ll now notice several subprocesses running under WhatsApp.
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